PatchBox and Twitter (weird features)
It’s an increasingly frequent situation where, having just added some new feature to PatchBox (in this case vector text rendering), it becomes plugged in to a wide range of existing functionality that opens up such a huge amount of possibilities I have to go and sit in a dark room for about an hour.
Well, not quite that bad, but it takes me back a bit.
For example, as the whole of PatchBox is LUA scripted, I bunged together a quick 50 line script that reads the public feed from twitter every 15 seconds and renders the first entry as vector text, seen here with a phong lighting CGFX shader.
I didn’t have to add any extra code as LUA happily loaded some external libraries (luaexpat and luasocket) after I’d copied them into the PatchBox directory, and then it was a simple case of making an HTTP request and parsing the XML.
Pretty basic, but a quick proof of concept and it works!
Thinking it might make quite a fine installation rendering out the real-time twitter feed onto a building using video mapping.
FUN.
Anyway, back to the cafe project…
