Basic characteristics
- 'Multiscreen drama' means that it involves characters who can move from screen to screen while talking and must maintain lipsync.
- 'Low cost' means that a heavy duty system with timecode and audio clocked synced players is probably out of reach.
- 'Multiscreen' means more video outputs than can typically be driven from a PC, certainly more than from a laptop.
- 'Interactive' means that the audience can influence the course of the drama in some way.
- 'Installation' means that it will typically be set up in a gallery-like situation.
Installation as a state machine
The sort of installation that the player can present is an example of a state machine. See here for details.Prototype system
The control program was written by Adam Martin, then at University of South Wales, for the first presentation of the 5-screen interactive drama installation Echo and Narcissus. It used a total of seven Apple MACs connected in a wired ethernet LAN. Five MACs ran copies of VLC player and output video to one projector each. One MAC with a touch screen ran a Flash program which collected the audience's votes at the appropriate point of the drama. This is known as the vote server. One MAC ran the control program, written in Java as a Processing sketch. Each screen had its own loudspeaker. The sound was encoded in a single 5.1 soundtrack output by one of the VLC players.Control program
I've continued Adam Martin's work with the control program. See here for details.Vote server
This is a computer on the LAN which interacts with the audience at appropriate times in the show. I've written a simple simulation as a Processing sketch, which is adequate for testing and demonstration, but something else, perhaps running on a Raspberry Pi with special hardware, will be required for the next presentation. This could make an interesting student project.Cheap video player hardware
I've made a prototype system with Raspberry Pis. See here for details. Turning this into an elegant package would be an ideal project for design students to work on.Video files
See here for details.Sound
See here for details.Re-engineering OMXPlayer
See here for details.