When your music career gets big, and you are touring with your band, add some concerted audience interaction to your concerts by letting the audience control a spotlight. All you need are a few thousand cheap wireless controllers, a receiver that sorts out the average [mode] input, and a remote controlled spotlight.

The audience can press buttons, each attempting to control the light, while the averager box puts out the median [sorry; mode] of all inputs. If the majority of the audience wants a white-hot focus on the lead singer's crotch, that's what they get. The guys who want to blind the drummer may get their chance later, if the safety guy lets them.

Other possibilities include letting the audience run the strobe lights, a bass drum or a howling applause machine. As long as some sort of average input makes the thing react, without destroying the show, the attendees can have fun and feel like part of the show. (Of course, some will be frustrated when they can't laser the bass player.)

Supplying the controllers could be expensive, but costs could be reduced in various ways. Renting and returning could be a pain, but selling or giving them only to regular attendees might work. Another option is to wrap the whole arena in a Faraday cage to prevent cell-phone use, then installing a buttload of receivers so the chumps can use their cell buttons . . . hmm, maybe not.
-- baconbrain, Jun 12 2008

controling the lights is a union member's job(IATSE). it's gotta be a pretty boring concert if the audience is more interested in fiddling with some controller device that has no direct effect on the show.
-- jaksplat, Jun 12 2008


Well, I find concerts to be very boring, but I do notice that the audience is often trying to interact somehow, whether with clapping, screaming or flicking lighters. I hadn't intended a fiddly control, but something easy to use. The goal is to see what the whole audience would do, if acting as a whole.
-- baconbrain, Jun 13 2008


//the averager box puts out the median of all inputs// - did you mean "median"? I would have thought "mode" would give a better result.
-- hippo, Jun 13 2008


Ditto Hippo, otherwise you are likely to be looking at a piece of gaffa tape on the floor at a point equidistant between the singer, lead guitarist and the hot session backing singer.
-- gnomethang, Jun 13 2008


My bad. "Mode" it must be. Sorry, it's been years since I slept through that class. See, there was a concert the night before . . .
-- baconbrain, Jun 13 2008


I am thinking about how this could be done. When a special forces soldier " paints" a bomb target, I assume it is with a laser. The bomb can see the laser and home in. I wonder if there is technology that can detect a red laser pointer blob in an audiorium. If so, these could be sued as targeting decviced.

The band would need reflective shades, or they will just get blinded by the laser pointers. It is a measure of how long it has been since I went to a concert that I wonder if blinding of performers by laser pointers every happens now.
-- bungston, Jun 13 2008



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