This week in Sensory Driven Storytelling we are exploring connected spaces by taking input from non-standard sources ( Kinect, Leap, VR, Arduino, Node.js, Web Browser, Ableton Midi etc ). I chose to use Node and Socket.io to input data into Unity.

I have been working on pulling live data from Twitter into a map using Socket.io in one of my classes, so I was excited to learn that I could also pull data into Unity with Socket.io.

I first got a twitter stream running in my terminal with node/socket. From there, I opened the web map I built with Leaflet and Mapbox in my browser. The map is currently mapping all tweets that come through the twitter streaming API with geolocation.

Then, in Unity, I am displaying a snippet from the beginning of each tweet as it is showing up on the map. I played with displaying the full tweet, but I really got a kick out of just the snippets showing in rapid succession.

After I got this working, I tried getting a particle system attached to incoming data on the socket. But I couldn’t get it to work, so I removed it.

Here’s that code:

And here’s a video of it all working in sync: