|
For the brand-new "Digital City" attraction at the
Futuroscope theme park, ETC has once again turned to
Medialon. One Manager V3 Pro and two Manager Lite
Editions have been employed to control more than 100
Thomson Plasma screens and an equal number of Microsoft
X-Box's.
The attraction is divided into 4 sections. The first is
just inside the building, where visitors waiting on line
can view media displayed on seven plasma screens while
standing in front of a "mur vegetal"—a grass and ivy
covered indoor wall. Next, visitors enter a room where
they watch, on 8 more plasma screens, films explaining
the history of video games. Moving into the third room,
visitors are paired off and and set up with an Xbox
feeding a Thompson screen (there are 60 plasma screens
and 60 Microsoft X-Box's for a total of 120 visitor
capacity). After a short tutorial, they are given 9
minutes of playing time. The fourth room features 5
clusters of 8 screens and X-Box's (broken down by gaming
genre, action, sport, arcade, etc.) where those who have
made previous reservations may have his/her own screen
and X-Box.
The three Managers control all of the screens, all of
the X-Box's, three MPEG video servers, a video matrix,
lighting dimmers, 32 input and output signals as well as
handling the automatic door control. The Manager Pro
Edition is the master controller, while the two Lite
Editions are connected to the Pro system. The Lite
Editions also have all user controls, govern the
program's start and stop function and manage the length
of time that each game or video runs. Integration of
this immense system was handled by Guy Garcia of
audiovisual integration company, ETC.
“The most important function of the manager is to
control the X-Box's at the opening of the pavilion with
an interface we designed,” commented Patrick Dury
(title) at ETC. “Just imagine having to start 100
X-Box's by hand every morning knowing they are all
installed in a closet”. The Medialon Manager also allows
the host to control the amount of playing time and
automatically sends a reset command to the X-Box’s to
restart a new game when that time is up. In between the
games, when the costumers come in, Manager switches all
the monitors inputs to video and a short piece on the
X-Box is seen. “I've been programming with Medialon since
the first version in 1999” concluded Dury. “I’ve tried
a few other show control programs but Manager is the
best for my needs. The interface is great and it can
seamlessly handle a project of any size. we recently
employed it in the "Vulcania” theme park where we have
80 Managers connected by network.” |
