These crisp white dials are Twitter Dials. They are currently installed at the British Library as part of the Growing Knowledge exhibition, which looks at new ways to use technology to interact with information. The Twitter Dials show the level of Twitter activity in cities across the world, and are actually built from old repurposed electricity meters.
Jacob Lant from the British Library said: “The Twitter Dials use Twitter’s geolocation function, so if the tweeting individual has turned ‘geolocation’ on in preferences it automatically maps it via the phone’s GPS unit. The scanning radius is 30km from the centre of each city.”
The Twitter Dials are part of a UCL research project, and you can take a look at the dials online, although they’re not quite as pretty as the real life versions. Right about now you can watch the New York needle start moving as people start to get up. Head here for the online Twitter dials…
What do you think this data could be used for? Drop us a line in the comments and let us know!
Here’s the full video of the British Library Growing Knowledge exhibition:
