We were really excited to be asked by the agency Smak to create a Twitter wall to feature in a promotion, Toronto Looks Good on You, they were creating for their client Tourism Toronto for the 2010 Toronto Pride event.

The Twitter wall we created allowed passers-by interact by sending in messages about why they loved Toronto. In addition the system handled a prize draw, with everyone who tweeted and mentioned the official hashtag (aka keyword) getting entered to win some cool, Toronto related prizes.

Creating for the crowd at Pride was great fun, they were a hugely positive and curious bunch who seemed to enjoy the Twitter wall.

Last week Media Lab Toronto showed a new, custom message projection wall created for RBC. The piece was developed to be shown at Toronto’s Inside Out Film Festival opening gala. The concept was to take electronic messages, sent by party-goers via SMS and Twitter, and convert them into a real-time typewritten message.

The execution was a big success. Gridcast handled the projection side. Including a huge projection on the outside of the BATA Shoe Museum, our venue, visible from busy Bloor Street. We got plenty of traffic during the night and the feedback was really positive.

More photos after the jump and a video snapshot over here.

Images (c) Susannah Dinnen, 2010

This piece was a collaboration between Patrick Dinnen and Michael Pereira, with still photography by Susannah Dinnen.

As a byproduct of generating the Twitter Wall I created for TEDxWaterloo I ended up with about a thousand speech bubble images, representing the Twitter conversation during the event.

As an experiment I pieced all of these speech bubble images together into a huge image (182 megapixels). The thought was that stitching together all these messages in a visual grid would provide a visualisation of the day and a novel way to browse the conversation. Check out the final product.

Luckily for me others have already figured out how to split large images into tiles and integrate with the Google Maps browser for a ready made system to explore huge images online.

I was lucky enough to be invited to create a Twitter Wall for the TEDxWaterloo conference. This seemed like a great opportunity to create something brand new. Particularly a wall that respected the quantity and volume of the Twitter activity that hapens around a conference of this sort.

I came up with an (as yet unnamed) Twitter Wall based on the metaphor of speech bubbles. The system automatically picked up every Tweet mentioning TEDxWaterloo on the day of the event, about 1,000 of them. Each was turned into a graphical speech bubble and scrolled onto the screen. This provided an easy way for attendees, Twitter users or not, to get a sense of the active conversation that took place around the event.

update: check out the video on Vimeo.

I’m celebrating Chinese new year by looking back at projects MLT has completed over the last couple of years. No particular reason, but I didn’t do it at the beginning of 2010 and now seem as good a time as any other. If you click through to the Flickr image above you’ll see a shot of 11 new business cards featuring MLT projects. You can hover over the images to get a description of each.

I have big plans for pushing into some interesting places with installation/interactive/fun technology/art stuff in 2010. Looking back at where we’ve been already makes me pretty excited about this. Stay tuned…

In late December I was approached by the Vapor Media group from Ryerson University. They were planning a gallery event called Digitalscapes and had in mind a particular installation art piece they wanted built. The concept was for a jumble of paper lanterns in the window of Thrush Holmes gallery, the lanterns being lit up in patterns that responded to the beat of the music played by the DJs for the event.

I took on the development and building of this project. Ordering piles of BlinkM LED modules and hacking together Processing code and Arduino based electronics to make it reality. I plan to publish a how-to post with more tech details later – as I was standing on the shoulders of generous giants for this project and want to give something back.

Huge thanks to Michael Pereira who helped with the physical installation on the day as well as some inevitable last minute troubleshooting.

The final installation took the form of 5 large paper lanterns hanging in the gallery window. Each was lit by a set of red-green-blue LEDs the exact colour and brightness of each lantern being controlled by the beat-monitoring software I created. It was a fun project, but a lot of work. Physical installations being subject to laws of physics can get complicated fast. Lots of interesting lessons and I’m happy with the final product. Next is to use that gear and knowledge I now have to build something fun and interactive (as opposed to just reactive). Perhaps I’ll hook it all up to the Arduinome controller I built last year.

So I threw this together, it illustrates two days of Twitter messages from the people I follow as a flock of pigeons. Next up is a giant, live updated, animated version. Just as soon as I find some time and a few nice plasma screens.

Update: video of the installation in action now online.

Despite a few maddening moments between a fully functional set-up and the actual start of the Toronto The Good gathering, the debut of our 1834 Roller Rider installation went over quite well with those in attendance. (see NOW) A good constant stream of folks watching from behind and queuing up to mount the cruiser controlled installation (and then dismounting with smiles still on) suggests Version 1 is something worth building on.

What began as a beer & burgers conversation about playing mobile-controlled pacman on the streets of Toronto soon morphed into the ambling experience that could make indoor riding actually fun. Imagine pedaling the streets of 1834’s Toronto while watching synced video of those streets today. Spot those bits of old architecture? How about a faded mural or that spot where Duke and Newgate once met and now form Adelaide?

On the surface the Roller Rider seemed pretty straight-forward — a little bit of hardware and software talking between bike and computer-controlled video — but Patrick and I owe some thanks for the insight of, among others, the dedicated Yvonne Bambrick of the Toronto Cyclists Union and Navid Taslimi of Goldsprints.

And of course Willie (or Willy?) the junior MLTer who brings a state of zen with him and, even when boards are spewing more noise than data, has the ability to maintain his own and our composure. Plus, as a pre-tween, he’s got loads of energy and he kept the wheels spinning; one of the few to do the full figure-8 loop — repeatedly at that.

Photo: 1834 Roller Rider at Toronto the Good via Patrick Dinnen’s Flickr
More pics and some video coming.