Birdbox

Turning tweets into… tweets.

Birdbox was built along with Raymond Huang during HackUMass VII. The app is an audioscape/visualization of realtime twitter data. We represent Twitter as an ecosystem inhabited by various bird species. Each time someone tweets, we analyze the sentiment of their tweet and produce an appropriate sounding bird call (low and gravely for a negative sentiment, high and cheery for positive sentiment). We also produce a ripple in the 3D space with a magnitude according to the author’s following, representing their reach to other users. Within the app, you can select which topics you want to stream from. You can get a sense of the overall discourse about a person or topic based on the audio and visual feedback from the Birdbox.

This was my first time using C# and the Unity engine, but I was able to pick it up and contribute pretty quick. I worked on hooking up the realtime Twitter data, creating a library of trimmed bird calls, and the visual design of the app.