Field notes
What we've learned about crowd participation, hyping a room, and pointing cameras at audiences that would rather not be pointed at.
Why it runs on one Mac and not a server
An architectural decision that looks lazy and is not: the whole thing runs on one Mac, locally, with no server involved. What the alternative…
Read →Crowd participation for sports and half-time
Sports crowds are the easiest audience for participation technology and the least forgiving environment to run it in. Why the audience is easy They…
Read →Audience participation at weddings without the cringe
Weddings are the hardest room for audience participation, and the one where it pays off most when it lands. Why they are hard A…
Read →The calibration problem: every room is a different shape
Every room is a different shape, at a different distance, with different people in it. That means there is no such thing as a…
Read →Designing a game one person cannot win
The design constraint we keep coming back to: no individual should be able to move the outcome much on their own. It sounds like…
Read →Why we lock camera exposure, and what happens when you don’t
Every camera-driven crowd system rests on one assumption: the only thing changing in the picture is the audience. Automatic exposure destroys that assumption, and…
Read →Where a crowd game fits in a run of show
A crowd game is a warm-up instrument. Put it in the wrong slot and it works against the thing it was supposed to help.…
Read →Movement vs posture: two ways to read a crowd
We ended up with two detection modes rather than one, because a still crowd and a moving crowd are genuinely different measurement problems. Movement…
Read →What we learned pointing a webcam at forty people
First real test: a webcam, a laptop, and about forty people who had been told nothing beforehand. Here is what broke. They did not…
Read →Camera or microphone? Choosing a sensor for crowd input
If you want a room to control something without anybody installing anything, you have two sensors available. They are good at different things and…
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