“Do you see the connections?”

Inspired by TEDxTokyo 2014 theme: “Connecting the Unconnected”, TEDxTokyo design team this year aimed to create interactive visual graphics for the event.
After several meeting, we decided to make use of the real-time tweets which the participants of the event write, and display it as connected dots with TED speaker. Each dot holds a picture of twitter user, thus creating visual information. Also when other users reply to a tweet, these users get *Connected* with each other and this connection is visualized on the screen.

In order to decide which tweets to be used and displayed, the application filters for tweets with tag: “#TEDxTokyo” thus it would know this tweet relate somehow to the event. Then a classification step takes place to identify which speaker those tweets are related to. So it searches inside each tweet for speaker name and if found it get connected to him.

For interaction, we used leapmotion placed in front of the screen (inspired by sci-fi movies type of interaction), and users can hover and select tweets to read (by hovering over the dots) or the can change the speaker by sweeping over it.

On our design team website:
http://eatcreative.jp/en/connecting-the-unconnected/
http://eatcreative.jp/en/case_study/tedxtokyo/