Shining LEDs Into My Eyes to Increase Viewer Engagement
Concepts: text recognition, string parsing, Arduino, Python
This is a weird one.
Aside from making YouTube videos, I also regularly livestream on Twitch where I go over engineering concepts with my audience, which consists largely of high school and college students. They get to ask me questions as I prototype various things and it's a win-win for everyone. However, as is typical of most livestreams, viewer engagement can sometimes decrease for no reason. Despite good viewership, sometimes there just isn't that much to talk about! However, as with most content creation platforms, more engagement = more good. So, I gave my viewers the ability to shine LEDs into my eyes at any point in time just by participating in the chat!
The hardware consists of a pair of LEDs connected to an Arduino. A Python script reads the chat on Twitch and sends triggers to turn on the LEDs. Originally, I had written the code to work based on bit donations. The code would take periodic screenshots of the chat and parse the messages to find how many "bits" were donated (1 bit = 1 cent in Twitch land). However, it felt unethical to encourage my young audience to donate money my way, so I changed it to viewer engagement.
Aside from making YouTube videos, I also regularly livestream on Twitch where I go over engineering concepts with my audience, which consists largely of high school and college students. They get to ask me questions as I prototype various things and it's a win-win for everyone. However, as is typical of most livestreams, viewer engagement can sometimes decrease for no reason. Despite good viewership, sometimes there just isn't that much to talk about! However, as with most content creation platforms, more engagement = more good. So, I gave my viewers the ability to shine LEDs into my eyes at any point in time just by participating in the chat!
The hardware consists of a pair of LEDs connected to an Arduino. A Python script reads the chat on Twitch and sends triggers to turn on the LEDs. Originally, I had written the code to work based on bit donations. The code would take periodic screenshots of the chat and parse the messages to find how many "bits" were donated (1 bit = 1 cent in Twitch land). However, it felt unethical to encourage my young audience to donate money my way, so I changed it to viewer engagement.