The machine works by dispensing one of six ingredients from 250ml containers…
Some people may be heavy consumers of social media – but a team of French innovators has made it possible to “actually drink Twitter” with the development of a cocktail-mixing machine powered by people’s tweets.
As Data Cocktail inventor Clément Gault explained, “when a cocktail is desired, the machine will look for the five latest messages around the world quoting one of the available ingredients. These latest messages will define the drink composition”.
In practice, this means that, if the five latest tweets at the time of mixing referenced vodka, triple sec, lime and cranberry two times, the machine would create the perfect cosmopolitan.
The technology prints out the recipe for the cocktail along with the corresponding tweets when it makes each concoction, giving users a bespoke gift that they can take away from the experience.
…into a glass that waits for it underneath the nozzle. © Data Cocktail
The machine can be set up to include almost any cocktail ingredient – though dense or viscous inclusions should be avoided, its developers said – and accepts requests in the form of Twitter keywords, hashtags or even mentions.
For a special event, it is possible to customise the experience so that an individual company’s Twitter account is used as the basis for Data Cocktail’s mixing.
Depending on the device configuration, the preparation of the cocktail can take up to a minute and, in its current configuration, Data Cocktail may provide up to six different ingredients – each linked to their own Twitter request – with every cocktail typically containing five parts.
The project, led by Gault, originated as a project at Laboratoire Arts et Technologies, part of Stereloux Nantes, in 2014.
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