Collating streams of content from various sources and displaying them on a giant LED screen – you have the Social Wall.
For what appears visually as a simple applications displaying content there is a bit going on! There is 4 different data sources that content comes in as. To add to this, different content had different priorities and some content was only to be seen after a video that covered the whole screen had finished so people did not miss out on see them!
From our backend dev I received JSON content for Lexus’ Instagram and also public Instagram and Twitter content that had been moderated from a 3rd party. There were also images that people could create onsite in an interactive called the Social Chamber.
All of these content elements had varying levels of priority, but also, once they had been seen they then went into a list that would be repeated until new content of the same type would enter the wall. Items in this list would eventually be pushed out and not used anymore.
I built a queuing system that took care of all this and also added a feature that wrote to a file the state of the content so that if the app needed to be closed or lost power unexpectedly, it would then pick up from where it left off and not repeat old content.
Static pictures don’t do the app justice so here is a little video to give an idea of how it looked.
Social Wall from jkafkaris on Vimeo.
Just try imagine it really big : )
JK
