Visualizing a Twitter Stream in VR with Three.js and Node

Twitter is a wonderful and information rich beast. I wanted to combine some of the powers of visualization, Three.js and its VR capabilities with Socket.IO and Node to create a pretty world of particles generated via a Twitter stream. I’ve previously discussed all the basics of developing virtual reality web experiences in the SitePoint article Bringing VR to the Web with Google Cardboard and Three.js, so if you are new to this whole idea – read that one first and come back. This demo uses the same foundations. The demo we will be building will watch a live Twitter stream for a keyword. When one is tweeted out whilst it is watching the stream, it will bring up a “tower” of shining particles that represent how long the tweet was. This demo in particular will look for mentions of the word “pizza”. Why pizza you ask? I was looking for a term which was not mentioned as frequently as “bieber” but more frequently than “boxcar racing hyenas”. In short, the best terms are ones which are relatively frequent enough that they’ll appear whilst you are watching, but not so frequent that they come through at many hundreds a second. Pizza is one of them.