project related rant.

I've been looking around various processing and arduino sites, trying to find a piece of work that is similar to my idea, and i'm not really finding it anywhere. It seems people are more interested in getting data or information from the real world into the virtual, instead of the other way round.

There are several reasons why i chose to do this project this way, and make myself this brief. One is that technology is constantly becoming more and more personal, with mobile phones and ever smaller laptops. I don't think the internet is going to stay on screen forever, i think there are alternative ways of displaying the information and i think it's going to try to integrate more into the real world.

The reason i chose twitter for this project as the website to bring into the real world and display in an alternative way is because it's a tool that quite a lot of people use. It's a tool that people use to communicate with each other and also with themselves:



This data that people update whenever they feel like expresses how they are feeling in that moment in time, or just what they're up to. But it just sits on a web page, or in their widget, or in a feed somewhere in the internet. this information that expresses their thoughts isn't being expressed in a very expressive way (too many expressives, i know).

The reason that i'm choosing to display this information in patterns is because i'm trying to get it away from a screen, i don't want to recreate a standard display. i want it to be visual as that's personally my favourite sense, and i want there to be a level of secrecy in what each pattern means as there is a level of deciphering that needs to be done in twitter, with all the leet speek and emoticons.

I admit that i do need to work on what words the program is looking for, but that just means trawling through the twitterverse to see what the most popular and most relevant phrases are.

I hope this finally gets people understanding what i'm trying to do. I'm finding it quite frustrating that no matter how many times i try to explain this, no body seems to get the point of it.