About

CoMotionPlay makes games that a whole room plays at once.

The idea is narrow on purpose. Audience-participation technology has spent a decade asking people to get their phones out — download this, scan that, join with a code — and the result is a room full of people looking down at their hands instead of up at each other. The interesting thing about a crowd is that it is a crowd. Handing everyone a private screen is a strange way to celebrate that.

So: one camera, pointed at the room. The software reads how the audience is moving or holding itself and turns a thousand bodies into a single control signal. Nobody installs anything. Nobody looks down. The only way to play is together, and the moment a room works that out — usually about thirty seconds in — is the entire point of the product.

Where it comes from

This is built by people who work in live events, which shows up in the decisions. The software runs on one Mac because that is what is already in the rack. Calibration is captured from the room rather than typed in, because every room is different and you are standing in it. Exposure lock is called out on every page because a lighting desk will otherwise play your game for you.

It also shows up in what we will tell you. The documentation says where the limits are — which camera positions do not work, what makes calibration touchy, when to recalibrate. A crowd game that fails in front of nine hundred people is worse than no crowd game, and we would rather lose a sale than be the reason that happens.

A catalogue, not a product

One title is a novelty. The plan is a catalogue — different things a room can do together, all running on the same engine and the same camera, so that once a venue is set up for one, it is set up for all of them.

Who we are

CoMotionPlay is a Bitstream Media product. Equipment hire is arranged through Red Globe.

Get in touch — particularly if you have a room you think will break it. Those are the useful ones.