Live Interactive Twitter / Instagram Projection

By Tom Conlon, Founder + CEO

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North Street has developed a fun little piece of technology we call an “interactive art installation.” It’s a living, breathing, moving photo collage that gets projected onto a surface (a 12’ x 9’ wall usually does the trick) and is constantly updated in real-time with Instagram and Twitter images of a particular tag. Our platform is built on HTML, HTML Canvas, Javascript, JSON, Ajax and CakePHP and it runs in Google’s Chrome browser.

Here’s some info:

1) It’s instant. The time between when an image is tagged and when it appears in the collage is in the range of 3 to 10 seconds (depending on whose API we’re calling: Twitter, TwitPic or Instagram)

2) It’s built using standards-based, open-source web technologies and because it’s really just a giant webpage at heart, it’s incredibly easy to change and adapt. No compiling. No plug-ins.

3) It’s a completely user-controlled and wonderfully unpredictable experience. We set it up with a seed hashtag (both #highlinepark and #taxisnyc make for some beautiful imagery), then it’s out of our control. The people in the room shape what it ends up looking like with the images that they tag. Attendee images gradually replace seed images over the course of the event so that the “finished” piece ends up being a completely different animal than what it started out as. We’ve run this thing a dozen times and each time we’re amazed by how participants end up shaping it.

4) It’s “sponsorable.” We’ve run it at a couple of events where the seed imagery is provided by a sponsor and the collage includes fixed logo placement. We’ve also built a moderation panel that runs on an iPad so that inappropriate images can be prevented from making it on the wall. We provide post-event analytics showing platform breakdown (Instagram vs Twitter vs TwitPic), top users and a summary of all of the images tagged during the event.

5) A companion web embed or Facebook tab can be created as an event summary OR as a way of letting non-attendees participate in shaping the experience while the event is happening.

Contact us if you’re interested in our projection for an event.

About north street

We engineer the thoughtful transformation of great organizations. Our proven process helps us understand what your competitors are doing right — and wrong. Want to learn more? Let’s chat.

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