Global Twitter Heartbeat Project: PufferSphere

In a collaboration with SGI and the University of Illinois' CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information (CIGI) Laboratory we debuted the first-ever realtime combined population, tone, and geographic analysis of the live Twitter Decahose (10% of all tweets globally), creating a realtime map of global dreams and fears. We displayed the live Twitter emotional heatmaps on both an 80" LCD monitor and a Pufferfish PufferSphere, which is an internally-projected spherical display which uses a fisheye lens to project an image from a bottom-mounted projector across the spherical display surface, rather than from outside onto the sphere, allowing visitors to walk directly up to the image. In essence we delivered the world on a sphere.