For TED 2012 at Long Beach, California, interactive directors Hellicar & Lewis were commissioned to create The Dewar’s Hub. The Dewar’s Hub is an interactive audio visual installation that uses OpenFrameworks to deliver a real time experience that bridges the real world and Twitter.

TED attendees and offsite Twitter users interacted with the Hub by tweeting search terms to @dewarshub. The installation responded by displaying the search term in the midst of a real time visualisation of all the Twitter activity at TED - drawing connections between keywords and tweets in real time. As well as using a Microsoft Kinect to allow real world users to “stir” the visualisation, the Hub responded to offsite Twitter users by replying to their search term tweet with a screen shot of the visualisation - creating a feedback loop between the installation and the social network.