Social media and the London Eye will unite for the Olympics to create a lightshow which will reflect the attitude of Twitter users towards the games.
The London landmark will be illuminated at 21.00BST on each day of the Olympics and Paralympics to display the day’s tweets relating to the London Olympic games.
The number of lights illuminated around the circular track on the Eye will reflect positive/negative attitudes towards the 2012 summer games. For instance, three quarters of light will represent an overall positive attitude of 75% from users tweeting about the games.
An algorithm created by a group of graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be used to linguistically analyze tweets. With buzz words such as “Olympics”, “Torch”, “London 2012” and so on, measured with another library of words each given a score; for example “brilliant” might be worth +3, while “failure” could be -4.
Wheel sponsors, EDF Energy, said the lightshow is the first to be driven by social media. Displays of the Union Flag in gold, silver and bronze lighting will also be displayed depending on the medal wins on that particular day for Team GB wins.
The show will be live streamed at: www.energyofthenation.com
