The Basics | installation | Public space | Web Version | Technical
Technical
 
The One Word Movie application consists of active components on three levels: (1) a standalone projector application loading and presenting the images as well as controlling running-speed and score; (2) a server-side script running on a web-server querying the search engines and collecting the URLs of the images; and (3) a database collecting the search terms from the SMS input channel.
The installation in the public space will function the following way: a viewer/passerby sends an SMS message with a search term included to a special number of the local mobile network. The receiving telecommunication provider forwards this search term to a database running on the Internet where the terms are collected. The projector application - running on a normal Windows computer beside the video projector – queries the database regularly to check for newly arrived terms. If there is a new search term, the projector application calls a script on our web-server with this term as a parameter and receives in turn a list with URLs to images from the script. The application then downloads the images and starts to play the movie as soon as there are enough images available. The process of calling the server-side script, receiving an URL list and downloading the images is then repeated as long as the movie is running. The movie stops when there are either no more images available with the search term or after a certain time period if there is a queue of terms waiting to be played
Schematically, these are the steps involved.
1. passerby sends SMS to telecommunications antenna
2. search term is forwarded to the internet gateway of telecomm company
3. search term is sent to the database server
4. projection application is querying the database for new terms
5. new terms are sent back to application
6. application is calling script on server with the term as a parameter
7. script is querying the google image-database
8. search results are sent back to the script an URLs are parsed by the script
9. extracted URLs are sent back to the projection application
10. application is loading the images to the local cache and starts the movie
OneWordMovie has been tested extensively and works very reliably and cannot be crashed through user input.