Ford VJ Experience development for Imagination at the Geneva Motorshow
International communications agency Imagination have employed the services of Digital Antics’ team of systems design, programming and technical support staff to develop core server and client-side interactive elements for the ‘Ford VJ Experience’. Digital Antics were asked to develop and implement a fully integrated public presentation system, designed exclusively for Ford, to run on their stand at the 2007 Geneva motor show.
Calling on the expertise of their in-house show control programmers, system designers and database experts, Digital Antics set to work on producing a system that would make use of a vast 1584×932 LED wall and second sweeping curve screen array, both playing back near true hi-definition brand films using the Digital Antics player system as well as two giant touchscreens and a unique, database driven, user interface.
Content Management
The Ford Blue Wall system was designed to be a custom playback, control and interactive VJ playlisting system. Driven by user generated content from a database, the three screens at the centre of the Ford stand were certainly eye-catching. The stand visitors were able to submit their own pictures and messages via SMS, Bluetooth and media hubs in the area. Video content was also being uploaded by a Vox-Pops crew interviewing the public on and around the stand. This was all stored within an enormous filestore with meta-data referenced within an SQL database. Digital Antics created a custom online vetting and administering system to allow moderators to assess each asset individually, approve or disapprove it and finally assign category meta-data. Using a bespoke automatic thumbnailing system, created by Digital Antics, assets were then checked and multiple thumbnails created for the different systems downstream to use.
Content was then displayed across several 65″ touchscreen plasmas enabling VJs to arrange the visuals using a custom written sorting station (C# and XNA). Using “Minority Report” style touchscreen manipulation, the VJs were able to create playlists of SMS, video footage and photos of the public from the media hubs. Simply by dragging the appropriate thumbnail image into a playlist at the foot of their screen, the VJs could build up unique sequences for each of their playlist sets. Within this editing phase, spatial keyframes can be added to image assets to create zoom and pan movements, while temporal keyframes can be added to videos to indicate points of interest, which are then referenced by the live VJ iMac computer. All of this information is continuously written into the database for future use.
Show Control
Using the show control network solution Kiss-Box, the VJ was able to interact with the main control system to switch the live VJ to screen via a button on the console - which was affectionately termed the BOSH button. A traffic light system was created to display responses for screen time. Once a request was received, the system illuminated a light on the VJ console to acknowledge the request. The system would then wait until the end of the currently playing brand film before playing a VJ Intro-Countdown video and then control five Barco D320 wall processors to switch the VJ to screen whilst illuminating a “now live on screen” light on the console.
At the end of the set, the VJ would press his BOSH button a second time to indicate that he had finished. The system then activates the opposite of the intro phase, switching the various lights on the console to indicate output being switched away from the screen, plays an outro video, switches the wall processors back to the Digital Antics players and continues the brand films where it left off.
This whole process of actions operates automatically at the correct point at the end of the currently playing video, removing the need for a timed or manually operated cue. This allows operation of the system complete flexibility to jump in and out of brand video loops seamlessly at any time, making the system potentially unique amongst other playback systems currently being used within the live events industry.
The VJ sets were run three times every hour throughout the day, but the flexibility of the system allowed it to potentially be cued up at any point.
Bespoke Playback Solution
The whole system was controlled by a customised version of the Digital Antics system controller, written in VB.NET. The playback of brand films used the Digital Antics player (C++) modified to allow the high resolution output of continuous brand footage on the giant LED main screen and secondary sweeping array. Brand footage was not only interspersed with VJ sets, but also an external PC noticeboard which was displayed over the top of video content via a Gefen DVI to HDSDI converter and a BlackMagic HDSDI capture card. This allowed the audience to see their own images both on the “smaller” 65″ plasmas and also life size on the main LED wall.
Technical services rendered to Imagination by Digital Antics for the Ford VJ Experience included:
- Database schema design and development (MySQL).
- System architecture design (interaction between FreeBSD, Windows and Mac based software systems).
- Central media server software development (administrative user HTML front end as well as SOAP machine interfaces coded in PHP running under FreeBSD, Apache, PHP5 and MySQL).
- VJ touchscreen interactive development (coded in C#.NET using XNA, DirectX, DirectShow running under Windows XP).
- Media batch processing background operations tool development taking jobs from the central media server in order to generate thumbnails (coded in C#.NET using DirectShow running under Windows XP).
- Implementation of Digital Antics’ media playback control solution developed in VB.NET and HD playback solution based around core code developed in C++, DirectX and DirectShow.
European Tour
Following the close of the Geneva Motorshow the system was packed up and shipped to the Netherlands where it is currently in use at the Amsterdam Motorshow. It will subsequently be used at the Frankfurt and Barcelona Motorshows later in the year.