The producers of the UK’s largest consumer electronics show – The Gadget Show Live, worked closely with Inition to develop ideas and technical solutions to engage the show’s audience in groundbreaking, fun and genuinely new ways.
Inition operates a busy R&D department which always sets out to go beyond the standard brief and for The Gadget Show Live, we developed bespoke software and technical solutions to achieve just that. We developed a unique vote capture system, a mass interactive game and a motion capture showpiece.
Flash Camera Voting
In a signature Gadget Show challenge, two of the presenters went head to head to win over the audience with a singing performance. Rather than asking people to vote for their favourite performer via SMS, Inition created a voting system that could register an individual’s preference via a flash from their camera phone.
Within two seconds, a camera rig on the stage captured each flash of light/vote which was processed by proprietary software developed by Inition Creative Production (? - IS THAT RIGHT). The system was able to register and count each vote and present the results graphically on large LED screens within 15 seconds.
Robust and highly accurate, our reliable system could even detect (and disregard) multiple votes from a single individual up to 80 metres away. It is highly scalable too. With more cameras, we could even increase the field of view of the rig up to 360 degrees and register the votes of tens of thousands of audience members up to 150 metres away and beyond.
Mass Drone Gaming
For the mass drone gaming section, a divided audience competed with the other half in a challenge to steer a mini drone towards a circle on a large LED screen using the motion of their arms and pitch of their voices. The winning team would be the one best able to co-ordinate their arm movements and voices as detected by the Inition sensors. Three standard 720p USB webcams were housed in a single rig angled in multiple directions. Rewritten drivers and settings would achieve the desired framerates. Inition’s own software, based on proprietary and various open source libraries, could accurately translate the motion of people's gesticulations to guide the flying drone towards a target. Further software was able to detect the pitch of vocal noises from the installed microphones - the higher the pitch, the higher the drone would fly.
A Virtual Strip
To get Suzi's avatar to do the strip, Jason entered the marker-less LILA system which is portable enough to be easily rigged up on stage. Jason mimed the start of the strip up until a key moment when an Inition developed animation of a Suzi Perry avatar stripping to a bare wireframe model seamlessy blended into Jason's real time avatar motion.
Conclusion
The Gadget Show Live event was regarded as a huge success receiving exceptional feedback from the audience, producers and even the presenters themselves. The system we used for the Gadget Show Live is part of our growing collection of mass audience interaction software called 'TAP' which features audience movement detection and sound processing for control, driving games with coloured steering wheels and quizzes.
Inition will be running a 'TAP' quiz event in Rome at the end of august which will use coloured voting cards and we are currently in talks with largescale live event organisers which will run up to the end of the year.