Winner of the swissnex Grand Prize
It Feels Like won the swissnex Grand Prize, one of three Grand Prizes. The swissnex Grand Prize awards $3,000 to cover the cost of a trip to one of the seven participating cities in Sense Your City. Goal of the swissnex Grand Prize is to connect with an explore the local swissnex community in research, innovation, technology and art.
Project Description
Where does my weather take me?
“It Feels Like” provides users a means of viewing their current weather conditions in an adventurous fashion. It takes current local weather information aggregated from Data Canvas nodes and compares this to a database of typical weather conditions from various international cities and finds the match with most similar weather. Once the match is found, “It Feels Like” presents to the user further visual information of the city and the season which it feels like. This could help recollect feelings from an old vacation spot, serve as a guide to possibly the next destination or introduce people to somewhere completely new.
While seasonally, the weather conditions in a given Data Canvas city are roughly fixed, the day to day variations could be significant. “It Feels Like” captures these variations live using Data Canvas sources and is capable of depicting for instance, the summer moments in Boston when it really feels like autumn in London or December in Rio. Overall the goal is to introduce, to the users, a sense of exploring the world while viewing their own local information. Moreover, this allows them to get a feel of what it is like elsewhere, using their local weather as a gauge.
The images displayed of the comparable cities are loaded from Flickr, a source rich of awe inspiring panoramas and is also a participant under the Creative Commons License.
While our prototype consists of only 27 fixed cities, we plan to expand this database both in quantity and also the forms of information gathered about each city (sounds, text etc.). One immediate direction of focus is on textual data through social media. Through semantic analysis on sources such as Twitter, we could additionally display positive posts from Tweets about the cities being displayed, to brighten the user’s day. All in all, “It Feels Like” thrives to add richer and happier dimensions to the way its users experience their local weather.
Created by Lanke Frank Tarimo Fu, Danielle Griego, Nikola Marinčić & Jorge Orozco | ETH (Zurich, Switzerland)