Spin the Camera
December 11, 2008 – 4:05 pmFor Live Web Peng and I used an Axis 214 PTZ IP camera to play a variation on Spin the Bottle with our class. Peng was our storyteller. Text communication was entirely by basic AJAX instant messaging and we used Flash Media Server for video communication. We gave our audience a broad summary of a story (a puzzle), and each participant was given a chance to ask a question (clues) about the story. Hopefully by the end of the game participants would assemble all the clues to solve the puzzle.
We imposed very tight restrictions on participants. Players communicated with us and each other with a live chat interface with camera controls. Due to the live and unpredictable nature of the storytelling, we knew that the chance was great for audience members to undermine the experience by chatting with one another and stealing control of the camera. We used AJAX to disable the controls for audience members not in turn, and PHP kept track of who was in turn. Hence only one person would have control of the camera and chat interface at a given turn, allowing the person to thoughfully pose a question without distraction.
players sit around a table, waiting for the camera to fall on them
After sending the question, it was Peng’s turn to respond from our admin page. After Peng’s response, he pressed a button that granted access to the camera to the person who just asked. This person would click “Spin The Camera” to spin the camera a random number of degrees. The camera would rest on another member. We would identify this member and give him or her access to chat and the whole process repeated itself. It was a lot of fun!
the IP camera sat in the middle of the table, and spun a random number of degrees to land on a random player
Here are the pages we used for the players and the admin. They are now read-only and don’t look like much, but we whipped this project up in just a few hours leading up to the presentation.
Technologies: IP camera, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, Flash Media Server
Notes: