Moodcloud

This post is a retrospective on a project I was privileged to participate in during Microsofts Makefest in 2013. The team I joined decided to build a Moodcloud.

What is a Moodcloud? Good question!

The idea was to build a physical representation of the state of the twitterverse and to make it interactive.

Here's how it works:

• Given a search term, moodcloud finds the top 16 topics in twitter related to that term
• The sentiment of each topic is retrieved via a Microsoft Research developed Sentiment Engine
• The physical device is updated with the list of topics and sentiments
• The physical device (the actual moodcloud) has 16 strings of full-color LEDs and speaker.
  • each sentiment is mapped to a color and a sound
  • the moodcloud mixes the 16 samples and sets each of the 16 strings to the color for the topic mapped to that string

This was a great project, mapping bits to physical experiences is extremely satisfying and while we don't have the moodcloud running now, it's inspired other projects around the lab and company that are just as innovative and intriguing.

For a more in depth description, my teammate Melissa, has written a blog post of her own.