The Brief
Based on Channel Five’s primetime technology show, Gadget Show Live is the UK’s biggest consumer electronics event, and is widely recognised as the best place to see, try and buy the latest consumer technology. The event, held over five days in Birmingham’s NEC, includes one hour of high energy entertainment hosted by presenters of The Gadget Show. Over the course of three years the producers at North One Television have approached Inition, asking us to provide fun and innovative crowd games to be played with audiences attending Gadget Show Live.
Our Solution
Olympic Crowd Gaming at Gadget Show Live 2012
Inition developed an Olympic-themed long jump game to be played at Gadget Show Live to celebrate the upcoming games.
To play the game, the 6,000 strong audience were divided into four groups and each assigned a presenter to support, with Jon Bentley acting as umpire. In order to help their presenter’s avatar to jump as far as possible, the audience were called upon to clap rhythmically in unison (to control the speed of the run-up) and then raise their arms together to initiate the jump. Jumping too late resulted in a foul being called and the presenter being disqualified!
Inition created this bespoke game entirely from scratch incorporating their crowd sensing technology. Stuart Cupit, Technical Director at Inition commented: “This is the first time we have created a crowd-game that incorporates detection of rhythmic clapping. This is our third year working with Gadget Show and North One TV creating crowd gaming experiences and we’re delighted the shows have been so popular and the crowd have loved engaging with our interactives.”
Gadget Show Live 2011
Inition developed a unique vote capture system, a crowd game and a motion capture showpiece for Gadget Show Live 2011.
Camera Flash 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 then processed by proprietary software developed at Inition. The system was able to register and count each vote and present the results graphically on large LED screens in less than 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. This system is highly scalable- with more cameras we could increase the field of view of the rig to 360 degrees and register the votes of tens of thousands of audience members up to 150 metres away and beyond.
Drone Crowd Gaming
For the drone crowd gaming section, one half of the audience competed against the other 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 cameras and microphones were used to monitor the entire arena. By making high pitched noises the audience could control how high the drone flew in the air and by swinging their arms back and forth they were able to control the direction of flight. To land the drone in the hole, everyone had to shout in unison: “Get in the hole!”
A Virtual Strip
Inition had already created an avatar version of presenter, Suzi Perry when she came to us for help winning the ‘Virtual Presenter’ challenge in Season 15 of The Gadget Show. For The Gadget Show Live, Inition set up LILA (Inition’s markerless motion capture solution) on stage in the arena. Jason Bradbury was then able to take control of Suzi’s avatar, forcing it to perfom a Full Monty-style strip before the audience. Jason improvised the start of avatar-Suzi’s seductive dance, the climax of which was an Inition-developed animation of the avatar removing her jacket to reveal a bare wireframe model.
The Results
Both the Gadget Show Live events that we were involved in were completely sold out and regarded as a huge success, receiving exceptional feedback from the audience, producers and presenters themselves. By providing exciting and innovative creative content at every turn, Inition has kept North One Television coming back for more!