During the Golden Week, the third version of the Yokanken’s exhibition was performed at the Miraikan’s museum. Yokanken is a kind of laboratory experimenting entertainments through art and technologies supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). One of the stand called “Post-Visit Map” was related to twitter, and the application was developed by Alliance Port…

The Stand

At this stand, people could write a message on a post-it. Two computers shipped with cameras were dedicated to shoot post-its and make them tweets. There were 5 topics to talk about – manpuku, hyougen, fumufumu, kankaku, narikiri – so 5 computers to display nearly in real time the tweets as well as the reactions related to. During 5 days, from may first to may fifth, visitors were allowed to write messages and interact with them.

The Viewer

Developed in a short time, the application is actually a simple webpage. HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a shell script did the trick. One computer behaves as a server, updating the data every minute. In the same way, every browser is checking every minute those data for new tweets or photos. The interface now is really basic: tweets are displayed horizontally as a timeline, the most recent at the left, and reactions are displayed vertically, the most recent at the top, and is auto-scrolling. The back-end is using twurl, the ruby-gem’s version of curl using oauth. The twitter’s hashtags were used to manage the topics. The front-end is using the jQuery UI library. The experimental user interface’s challenge was to create smart drag with the mouse, and a zoom’s option. The Google Chrome Browser was used in full screen mode.

The Event

The event was funny, lots of tweets were created, but a few replies. A special thanks to the volunteers who managed IT materials like camera & computers. For shure the stand should be bigger & funnier. People are actually expecting a lot from a simple computer and it’s a challenge to satisfy them. We wish a version 4. Current ideas about improving the rendering is adding more features like keyboard support, 3D with HTML5/CSS3, etc… Considering twitter, well the next big step would be a faster streaming ( less than 1 minute ) and grab the related tweets from everywhere ( retweets, replies, etc… ) and then, youtube ? Feel free to add your ideas to the comments.