Without fail, the holidays end up being one of the most stressful times of the year. Amidst the hustle and bustle, it's easy to lose the spirit of the season. And that's why we built the Cheer Tracker. To give busy Philadelphians a physical reminder of all the holiday happiness being shared around the globe. Luckily, we had the perfect platform. Our Philadelphia office windows overlook one of the busiest shopping districts in the city. A great opportunity to put smiles on the faces of people passing by. Cheer Tracker appeared to be a standard holiday window display, three Christmas trees with lights. The difference was, our trees would blink whenever someone in the world said merry, joy or cheer on Twitter. We were able to visualize goodwill on a global scale, for all to see. Digital to physical While it seems like an abstract idea, Cheer Tracker actually allowed us to capture and display the sentiment of an entire planet. Innovative technology The Neiman Labs team wanted to utilize the Belkin WeMo for this project. Unfortunately, we needed to develop a workaround for our idea to come to life. Using Perl's universal plug & play library, we communicated with our WeMo devices directly over a local WiFi connection without delay, rather than completing the IFFT loop. This provided us with the ability to send an instant signal and blink our trees in real time. Results Tracking began on December 7th and concluded on January 1st. Our initial goal was to capture a million expressions of holiday happiness, but we hit that in the first week alone. From there, the numbers continued to rise. Cheer Tracker captured 6,561,469 tweets worldwide and allowed us to put smiles on the faces of people passing by.
