geovibes

View focused on a specific news article
Default view
3D sentiment view
3D sentiment view when you run out of api calls

Inspiration

With the recent elections, we found it hard to keep up with news outside of the states, and hear of people's perspectives on a global scale. We wanted to make it easier to see and read of news all across the world, to bring a bird-eye's-view on our local problems and our local popular opinions. Geovibes was built to inform.

What it does

Geovibes is a news feed infograph, displaying news articles from all across the world on an interactive map in real time. We've included pictures of our previous version, from which we pivoted about 7 hours ago. We were attempting to build a 3D interactive globe displaying the same news as the current iteration of Geovibes does.

How we built it

Frontend

amchart (https://www.amcharts.com/)
lots of handcrafted javascript
lots of handcrafted css
mapping coordinates to png
REST requests to flask api

Backend

flask api server
threads and file lock

Data pipeline

lots of quota exceeding api subcriptions
lots of batch processing
mapping coordinates to locations
piping one api's results to the next (Bing News Search, Microsoft Text Analytics)

Challenges we ran from

Things we pivoted from

angular 2
three.js
web gl
twgl (thin wrapper for web gl)
kartograph.js
d3.js
coordinate mapping, especially from window cursor location to 3D globe coordinates within an HTML canvas
an overambitious idea for an unprepared team

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Everything

What I learned

batch processing
concurrency and thread communication
web gl stuff, and three.js, and the struggles
coordinate mapping, especially from window cursor location to 3D globe coordinates within an HTML canvas
angular 2