Moods of Berkeley :: An Interactive Walkway

Group Members: Ajeeta Dhole, Christine Schantz, Michael Craig

Description

Our project aims to capture and visualize the moods and sentiments of the Berkeley community along an interactive walkway located in Sproul Plaza. The concept is to capture thoughts and ideas via sound/text bytes during the day, and reflect them back to the community, via interesting visualizations, in the evening and night.

Input

The interactive walkway would come equipped with multiple recording devices to capture sound bytes, in two ways: random, non-contiguous, anonymized sound capture from the crowd throughout the day; and solicited, voluntary, user-recorded sound bytes about Berkeley fun-facts and interesting events. In addition, members of the Berkeley community would be able to submit text messages on campus.  

Output

The random sound and text bytes would be parsed to extract the most frequent and interesting words captured during the day, in an attempt to visualize the sentiment of that day. (Community members could intentionally “influence” the sentiment adding a playful aspect to the interaction.) The walkway would be lined with LED-illuminated “pressure-points” (possibly represented as foot prints) that, when stepped upon, would output the captured bytes as playback of sound snippets or text projected on the floor plane using overhead projectors. We expect that this aspect of the project will be especially appealing at night, when foot traffic is slower and LED effects will show up more vividly.

Additionally, user-submitted messages would be compiled for presentation on an interactive informational display adjacent to the walkway. Information about events and other fun/significant facts would move across the display surface at varying speeds. Pressure-points near the display would allow users to modulate or slow the motion of the text on the display screen, and to select and access more detailed information about specific messages.

By combining these two elements, we hope to create a fun, interactive, and an aesthetically pleasing environment in which members of the Berkeley community can engage with multiple layers of Berkeley’s dynamic culture.  

As we are still working out details for the project’s implementation—the above description is simply one of many possible configurations we have considered—we welcome any feedback anyone reading this may have.