Several constraints informed the design process for this build – a limited budget, a need for portability, adapting to a variety of venue sizes and having no video technician on site. We were forced to be creative in our approach, building a system that was simple to use.
Although unconventional in this setting, we opted to use ‘Resolume Arena 6’ to drive the installation. Double Take Projections were keen to utilise the audio-reactive capability of the software and the option to trigger the cue specific clips meant that we could ‘hack’ the software to resemble some basic game mechanics. The bulk of the content was created in After Effects while the generative components were created directly inside Resolume.
A contact microphone was positioned underneath either side of the table and fed into a USB audio interface. The team were able to isolate the frequency of noise that the ball made when coming into contact with the table and used that data to drive effective parameters. When the ball bounced off the table, the visuals reacted and morphed.
To add to the overall user experience, five arcade buttons were fabricated onto the edges of the table. These were hard-wired to an Arduino micro-computer which sent a MIDI signal to the laptop allowing players to keep score and change scenes.
