Moodulator

Determining the aggregate emotional state of a populace, let alone the planet, remains stubbornly analogue. Imagine you're a perfectly normal citizen of Beijing. How are you supposed to go about your day not knowing how New Delhi feels? There's simply no ambient channel to understand whether they're feeling optimistic, stressed, or just vaguely 'meh'. This lack of intuitive, cross-cultural mood awareness just won't do. Punditry is guesswork, polls are lagging indicators, and the news yields only anecdotal dread. We lack a real-time, at-a-glance metric for the collective vibe.

This distributed network consists of large-scale civic sculptures or displays on existing buildings positioned in high-traffic urban centres like Times Square and Shibuya. They display ambiguous, aggregated emotional data in the form of backlit LED or e-ink panels offering a cheap, weather-resistant solution.

The hue of each display is determined by a proprietary, opaque, constantly-updating algorithm crunching a baffling array of passively collected local inputs: anonymised social media sentiment analysis, relative market volatility indices, weather condition changes, noise levels, search query velocity deltas for predefined positive/negative correlated terms ("puppies" vs "landlord"), maybe even aggregate civic transit performance metrics. The usual suspects for quantifying that which cannot be quantified.

The output of these metrics is a small number of colours approaching a single dominant colour, mapped heuristically to the classic mood ring spectrum because why reinvent the wheel when perfectly good pseudo-science is available? Providing immediate visual feedback on the world's current assessed state of emotion. From 'Nervous Amber' through 'Average Green' to 'Passionate Violet' (or, more realistically, cycling through various shades of 'Overworked Grey' and 'Anxious Blue'). A central node aggregates these regional outputs and averages them, and each display is given that series of colours.

One may hope the aggregate output will foster a sense of understanding of the mood of others who are far and away.