The Brief
Inition was approached to design an interactive game for the Earls Court London show of Top Gear Live, the action-packed live version of the TV show. Inition developed an audience interactive which allowed crowds to test drive two of the world’s hottest supercars, in what was the world’s largest mass live audience participation game.
Solution
The software, written by Inition’s team of 3D developers, allowed the audience to compete in a racing car game live on two large screens. Vehicles were controlled by audience members individually holding up red or green cards to collectively steer either left or right. Acceleration was controlled by how much noise each side generates – the louder the audience shouts the faster the cars go. One half of the audience was pitted against the other in what turned out to be a heavily contested (and very noisy) battle for the chequered flag.
Each team had dedicated cameras to analyse the ratio of red to green being shown by the participants. Feeds from microphones were fed into custom software which dictated the acceleration and braking of the cars. The Earl’s Court game was played by 4,500 per show, with even larger crowds in Sydney at Acer Arena, Sydney Olympic Park, Homebush which held 7,000 capacity per show.
Results
Rowland French, Executive Producer of Top Gear Live said: “I’ve always wanted to get the Top Gear Live audience participating more in the show and developing an interactive lap of the Top Gear test track is about as perfect as it gets. Through working with Inition on yet another ground-breaking project we have easily succeeded in making the most advanced piece of motoring theatre in our history which I hope our audience will enjoy”.
James Gant, Director at Inition commented: “It’s tremendously exciting to produce such a grand interactive game experience for Top Gear Live. It demonstrates the scalability of Inition’s Interactive Technologies and hints at the future of mass live audience entertainment.”
Cool Wall– The audience participation engine was also used for a second part of the show, with a ‘democratic’ version of Top Gear’s infamous Cool Wall. Members of the audience could vote on whether cars appearing in the show were ‘Cool’ or ‘Uncool’ with a representation of the car moving across the projected Cool Wall to reflect the audience’s opinion. As you can images, this wasn’t always respected as, thank to a Clarkson-over-ride mode, Jeremy usually over-turned the audience’s decision with his own.