For those of you who are unfamiliar with the London Eye, it is a 394-foot Ferris wheel situated on the banks of the River Thames in London that attracts more than 3.5 million visitors annually. Built in 1999, it is one of the tallest Ferris wheels in the world and gives passengers an amazing 360-degree view of London from its 32 capsules. It is also about to become the world’s largest mood ring.
According to The Telegraph, a group of American graduates from the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT) and a British professor named Mike Thelwall have developed an algorithm that can measure the overall moods of Olympic-related tweets coming out of Great Britain. The end result will be the “world’s first social media driven light show.”
By measuring words such as “amazing” or quirky related terms such as “totally amazeballs,” the overall sentiment of the estimated 100,000 tweets per day during the Olympic can be measured. Starting Thursday night at 9 p.m. and continuing nightly for the remainder of the Games, the London Eye will glow purple if the overall sentiment is negative and yellow if it is positive. Green will represent an overall neutral feeling.
“The algorithm we developed converts real-time social emotions into colour and motion and then tweets to the light show,” Justin Manor, the founder of Sosolimited and one of the many brains behind the operation, explained. “We distil 24 hours of action into a 24 minute visual concert that embodies the emotional peaks and troughs of the day.”
The system can detect thousands of words from the dictionary as well as internet jargon like “LOL” and “OMG.” There’s no telling how accurate it will be, but it’s certainly a mind-boggling concept to anyone who is fascinated with technology. If housing complexes being topped with rooftop missiles didn’t strike you as cutting edge, maybe a 394-foot mood ring will.
