How to Turn a Stadium Full of People into Thousands of Pixels

http://priceonomics.com/how-to-turn-a-stadium-full-of-people-into/

14 4 11 years ago

pmontra• 11 years ago

The unrivaled masters of this art are the North Koreans. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/07/travel/nk-mass-games/ Plenty of videos on YouTube, search for human pixels

greggman2• 11 years ago

I've been wondering how easy it would be to do this with phones.

I've seen documents for setting up wifi networking for a stadium to serve 20000 people. After that you need to know where each phone is. You'd have everyone go to a webpage, with some cameras maybe you could flash the phones in different colors, patterns and figure out where they all are? Or you could just ask users to enter their seat number.

Then download a JS demo to the phone, tell the phone which pixel of the demo to show, make sure the clocks are synced. Instant giant screen!

Anyone want to work on this with me? Getting someone to wire the stadium for 20k people though, and testing it is the hard part?

ClassicFarris• 11 years ago

Yeah, I've thought of this too. I was thinking you could just use a normal mobile network, as you'll just be sending the correct color to a full screen (not a ton of data needed for that). I was thinking that a website serving up web socket connections would be the best way to send the data, no clock sync needed.

Just spin up $10K worth of AWS instances for a few hours to handle all of the connections, and done.

greggman2• 11 years ago

clock sync is far easier than sending data. Once the clocks are in sync the demo just runs. If you think the clocks are going to drift just sync them every 10 to 20 second.

Example: This demo runs on clock sync. In general no data is sent between the machines. They are running independently. They just happen to be using the same clock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko

When the camera changes that is sent to each machine (ie, change your camera to ...) but then it's back to no communication.

Use 20000 phones each with a much smaller view and you'll get the same thing.

How to Turn a Stadium Full of People into Thousands of Pixels

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