ProjectEmotoClientLondon 2012 OlympicsIndustrySports

Capturing and visualizing the global response to the London 2012 Olympic Games

The Challenge

How can significant public events and their accompanying worldwide emotions be captured and made tangible and traceable at the same time

The Result

An interactive online real-time visualisation and physical data sculpture that made the emotions around the event tangible

Our Expertise

Ideation
Data Analysis & Visualization
Engineering
Interaction Design
UX & UI Design

The Brief

How can we visualize the accompanying emotions of large events and make them traceable and tangible simultaneously?

Reception of the opening ceremony in the UK

Our Approach

For the Cultural Olympiad of the 2012 London Olympic Games, Studio NAND created emoto, a dual-part project consisting of both an online visualization and a physical installation that captured the collective response to the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Millions of Tweets concerning the Olympics were gathered to determine the collective sentiment on individual topics such as events, players, and teams.

Real-Time Online Visualization

In the online visualization, we have created two different perspectives onto the data. Using a combination of two interactive views, users were able to explore the ebbs and flows of discussions online.

Landing page of the online visualization

The Topics View, focused on communicating how much positive or negative attention each event, athlete or social topic was generating at each moment and over time.

The anecdotal and ephemeral was seen in the Message Stream View which showed Tweets in real-time as they were posted around the world.

Physical Installation

The information collected in the online component created an extensive profile of the games which was documented in an interactive installation at the WE PLAY closing exhibition.

Visitors could navigate a generative physical sculpture representing all responses over time with overlayed information from posted Tweets.