London Eye’s tweet-controlled light show to reflect the local Olympic mood

The U.K.'s most popular tourist attraction, famous for its champagne rides and terrific view, is about to go social.

Olympic organizers have partnered with a group of MIT graduates to transform the London Eye into a light show driven entirely on social media, Gizmag reports. The near 400-foot ferris wheel will display a half-hour light show every night during the games, reflecting how London currently feels about the Olympics by interpreting the local tweets.

The colours displayed will represent the general feeling, or "energy," shared among the tweeting public: positive feedback regarding the Olympics will be shown in yellow, a neutral response will reveal green, and a negative energy will render the London Eye purple. This is all calculated by an algorithm that "linguistically analyzes tweets about the Games from the U.K. and splits them into positive and negative conversations."

"The algorithm we developed converts real-time social emotions into color and motion — tweets to light show," explains Sosolimited Founder Justin Manor, whose company developed the technology. "We distill 24 hours of action into a 24 minute visual concert that embodies the emotional peaks and troughs of the day."

Former British decathlete Daley Thompson shares more in the video below:

Every night, the 24-minute Twitter-driven light show will be followed by what is being called the "Energy of the Nation," a six-minute light show that will celebrate the day's top sporting moments and the medals won by team Great Britain. Canadians may recall the Olympic rings in Coal Harbour that lit up in gold, silver or bronze with every Canadian medal won during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games.

"At the moment about 62 or 63 per cent of the people in Britain are really positive about it, and I suspect as we get closer to the Games and we start winning a few things, that percentage is going to go right up," shares Thompson in the video. "And as it goes right up, the light show changes every night and hopefully it will be all gold toward the end of the Games."

(Gizmag photo)