Field notes
What we've learned about crowd participation, hyping a room, and pointing cameras at audiences that would rather not be pointed at.
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…
Read →Reading a room: what audience energy looks like as a signal
Event people talk about a room’s energy as though it were a mood. If you are trying to measure it with a camera, it…
Read →Audience participation ideas for conferences that aren’t a Q&A app
Most conference “interactivity” is a poll. Here are formats that ask something more of a room, roughly ordered by how much nerve they take.…
Read →We’re building a game the whole audience plays at once
We have started building something odd: a game that cannot be played by one person. The idea came out of watching audience-participation technology fail…
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