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You enter the building and walk through a series of
spooky rooms and frightening scenes and, based on the
timing of your entry, the hotel seems to know you’re
coming. It senses your presence. Sentient building or
something else? Many of the amazing effects of the
Theaterworks Haunted Hotel can be credited to Medialon
Manager, the installation’s show control system.
Theaterworks Haunted Hotel, hosted by the Entertainment
Department of the New York City College of Technology
(City Tech), is an interactive theme park-like
attraction in Downtown Brooklyn, and was inspired by the
history of the borough. Visitors have no idea what
they’ll encounter when they check into the hotel. Talking
pirates? Haunted hallways? Upside-down rooms?
This year's Haunted Hotel is the fifth for City Tech. Visited
by over 1200 students, faculty, staff and members of the
surrounding community, the attraction is an opportunity
to entertain and display the students’ skills in
performance, lighting, sound, video and show control of
themed events.
The Haunted Hotel features include an animatronic
pirate, a haunted bathroom, haunted hallway, a maze
featuring numerous other interactions and animatronic
characters, and an interactive video performance. At the
end of the exhibit visitors enter a theater where they
can watch other people go though the exhibit on infra-red
surveillance cameras, and even see replays of themselves
getting spooked!
Behind the scenes over $250,000 worth of high-tech
equipment and a dozen computers makes the Haunted Hotel
possible. A Medialon Manager show-control system
controls the entire attraction, communicating with a
number of sensors over brand new custom made Modbus TCP-based
interface and via TCP/IP with an A/V. Stumpfl Wings
Platinum system for animatronic control of the
Pirate. A Richmond Sound Design Audiobox AB64 provides
sound effects for the basement level, while twin Stage
Research SFX systems provide the sound effects for the
main theater and the maze. A Whole Hog II controls
lighting, and new interactive video equipment provides
instant replay of scared patrons’ reactions.
“The Medialon Manager development environment is
uniquely able to handle a high-tech application like the
Haunted Hotel,” commented City Tech Associate Professor
and renowned show-control guru, John
Huntington. “Medialon Manager has a lot of features I
need, especially in the way it can deal with many
different input and output signals in a truly
interactive way. In Haunted Hotel, there are 12 to 15
separate shows that run completely independently from
one another, but which have to follow visitors as they
move from one locale to the next. Medialon triggers all
the various sub-attractions from a central, easy-to-use
interface. Each time someone goes though the Hotel, that
experience is a unique show, and the master Medialon
system monitors and controls the whole thing.”
Because of the show’s complexity and the fact it would
be run and monitored by non-technical people, Huntington
built the user interface before programming the
show. “The process needed to be operation-friendly first
so I designed it from the front-end back,” he
explained. Operators can monitor each exhibit on a
simple screen, see what it’s doing, that it’s behaving
properly and track the visitors as they move through the
attraction. A single user screen monitors all the show
components.
“One of Medialon’s strengths is to present an extremely
complex and unpredictable show in an elegant way,” said
Huntington . “This isn’t one big loop running. There are
triggers, sensors, motion detectors, photoelectric
devices -- all of which allow the visitors to interact
in real time with the attraction. Our goal is to make
visitors completely unaware that there is any technology
behind the scenes, and most of the audience members have
no idea that they are controlling the show.” |
