Technical Reckoning

Ed and I have just spent a revelatory day with our expert, Tom Melamed from Calvium. The morning began with us champing at the bit to get practical about the actual equipment we need to grapple with to make our idea work and has just finished, leaving us utterly spent and replete with many, if not possibly all the answers we craved. Thank you Tom.

Our day began with a thoughtful walk around the proposed route of the experience (documented in a previous blog), where we showed Tom each location and talked through what we would like to happen there. In each location we spoke about the desired visual effect and its method of triggering. We also discussed how the narrative of the audio would progress and be triggered and how on earth we could make sound and visual effect work in sync.

This last point has been the hot potato of the day and we have had some extremely useful discussions about how the careful interplay of narrative structure, sensor tolerance and sound design can marry to achieve a seemingly synchronomous and therefore thrilling effect!

Theses are the systems for triggering that we have discussed:

PDA and radio headphones system
Each group that goes on the journey will comprise of at least one adult and up to 6 children. The adult will have a PDA with the main bit of the audio element of the piece on it held within Mscape. This PDA will be attached to a radio transmitter. Each audience member will have radio receiving headphones. These headphones will receive signals from 2 different sorts of source, the PDA carried by the adult and localised signals broadcast from our RAVES units.

The loaf of bread
The group will carry with it a loaf of bread or something similar that they will use to lure the Unicorn back to the theatre. This will contain a wifi beacon which will trigger the RAVES en route.

Mscape
Will be our main system for coordinating sound. It can be programmed to play tracks responsively to triggers or ‘phidgets’. Only PC compatible. (It will be superseded next year by a new system that works with Android phone and will be cheaper.)

Triggering
We will be using 4 main different sorts of trigger: GPS, Wifi beacons, pressure plates and passive infrared sensors. These will be used singularly and paired for accuracy. For example – if we don’t need to be very accurate Wifi is sufficient. If we need to be more accurate we may use Wifi and a pressure pad so that the Wifi makes the pressure pad live and then the pad itself activates the effect. We will be triggering two types of event – the visual elements of the piece – ie projections, and cueing chapters within the audioscape on the PDA.

RAVES
Reactive audio visual entertainment system.
This is an independent unit that is triggered by the presence of the ‘loaf of bread,’ which in turn triggers a video projection and also transmits a second radio signal to the headphones. It consists of a laptop, a projector, a radio transmitter, a wifi beacon and a number of phidgets.

Beacons
These will transmit a Wifi signal which can be picked up by the PDA. The PDA will be able to judge its proximity to them and depending on whether the signal is weak / medium / strong etc respond in a different way according to how Mscape is programmed. For example, weak strength could be light rain, medium strength heavy rain and full strength rain and thunder.

And the beauty of this system is that the different elements only need to talk to the PDA and the loaf of bread. There is no need for it to be more integrated. Each element is a distinct module that interacts with the audience as they pass by it.

So the things we want to achieve for our autumn presentation have developed.

The Next Stage
We have 2 software jobs and one hardware job.
Software job 1: integrate a Wifi sniffer with Flash
Software job 2: build a Flash movie that plays audio and video (which can be adjustable by non-programmers
Hardware job 1: Integrate phidgets with pressure pads and PIR.

This should give us the tools to build a RAVES that we can play with.

Over the last few weeks we have refined the narrative side of the piece and now it feels like we are approaching a practical plan for realising it.

We also need to make some inroads on the visual side of the piece. Can anyone help us with holograms?

Ished – please can we borrow half a dozen of your PDAs for the whole summer please.