interactive Could Someone Give me Advice on Integrating Interactive Elements in Watchout Productions?

[besossenorita]

Hello there,

I am working on a project using Dataton Watchout and am looking to incorporate more interactive elements into our productions. Our team has primarily focused on creating visually engaging presentations and events; but we have been getting increasing requests for interactive features that allow for real time audience engagement and content customization during the show.

How have you successfully integrated touch screens into your Watchout setups? Are there specific hardware or software tools you recommend for ensuring smooth interaction and minimal latency?🤔

What are some effective ways to allow the audience to influence the content on screen? I have heard about using mobile apps for real time voting or feedback; but I am curious about the technical setup and how it interfaces with Watchout.

Has anyone worked with live data feeds; such as social media updates or live statistics; within their Watchout productions? What are the best practices for ensuring the data is displayed correctly and is visually cohesive with the rest of the presentation?🤔

Also, I have gone through this post; https://forum.dataton.com/topic/1156-integrating-dmx-commands-into-watchout-aws-devops-timeline/  which definitely helped me out a lot.

What are some common challenges you have encountered when adding interactivity to Watchout projects; and how did you overcome them?

Thank you in advance for your help and assistance.😇

[Benoit]

Hi Besossenorita,

I think you need to render webpage with various charts, voting systems, tweets...

Did you have a look to OBS with NDI plugin or vMix?

Both tools can render browsers to NDI but with some tweaks and controls compared to a simple desktop stream. Also you can setup NDI with alpha, can be usefull to add nice transparency to embedded into Watchout.

Benoit

[Mike Fahl]

While WATCHOUT's timeline based structure makes it intuitive and easy to program for linear shows, it doesn't lend itself well to highly interactive use cases, as you've noticed. However, such solutions can be realized by combining WATCHOUT with another system that's more suitable for interaction, using WATCHOUT for the visual aspects that work well there. WATCHOUT can also be controlled from the outside using inputs/variables coming from the interactive system. It's also possible to feed content into WATCHOUT using live feeds or web pages (e.g., using vMix, as mentioned by Benoit above, piping it to WATCHOUT over NDI or other capture methods).

You can see an example of a very effective integration between PIXILAB Blocks and WATCHOUT in this story:

https://pixilab.se/stories/cue-the-music

Here, Blocks handled all the game logic, score counting, etc, and generated some of the content (artists, songs, durations, etc coming from a separate database). This was then fed through WATCHOUT, driving all the LED screens. The graphics on the LED floor was animated through a combination of WATCHOUT and Blocks controlling some aspects using variables controlled directly by the game logic (as seen in the video a bit down in that story).

Mike

 

[RBeddig]

Maybe, to add to Benoit's ideas,

for interactivity you usually need some logical decision making in the background. I know Benoit has worked on integration of sensors in the past as well but all comes to the point, to use a control system besides WATCHOUT to control what is actually shown on screen.

Formerly we used control systems like Medialon Manager to get the information from external sensors and to make logical decisions. Nowadays we switched to Blocks to to the same. This part does the integration with sensors and the logics and then tells WATCHOUT what to do. And it helps you to create touch screens which is nothing you can easily do within a media server  software like WATCHOUT.