For my assignment, I have chosen to design my website around the idea of being able to visualize the retweets given to tweets that include a given hashtag using Twitter’s API.
Each tweet is represented by a circular sprite that is placed in a 3D scene, and each retweet, a smaller version of that sprite that is placed around the original tweet randomly. This creates a sort of nebula or cluster of points that together form art out of people’s interest in topics.
The project overall has been one of my favorite to work on, and with the use of Three.js, I was able to give the data a unique appearance with the use of scenes, and object placement functions that make it easier to position the points. I have also managed to allow the user to change what they input and refresh the search dynamically.
For the future, I would like to expand upon the original idea and implement options for multiple keywords, or other types of data to look for other than hashtags. I also think I could attempt to attach links to each node so the user could actually view the original tweet.
