It’s Halves week! This entire week is being spent getting ready for our Halves presentation, which is on Friday. This means making all of the content we want to show, making a slideshow, and practicing. I’ll talk more about the presentation itself later in this post, but first, here are a few updates on tech and story.

Opening Animatic

When guests first enter our experience, we want them to see an animatic that introduces them to the characters and mystery, and gives them some direction. This week, Moe and Benjamin worked on creating the animatic, which involved writing the script, bringing in Benjamin’s son and niece to voice act, creating the art, and editing the video.

Here’s how it turned out!

Tech and Equipment Updates

This week we were given a space to build our final experience! Along with this, we got a PC to run the experience, a touchscreen for the facilitator, and a router for any networked interactions we need.

We’ve also discovered a good way to connect the landline phone to our PC! It was rather complicated to get working because old landline phones were designed to be connected directly to a phone line, where they communicate with a call routing service using analog signals. Computers on the other hand, send information digitally and don’t really interact with the phone network. Our solution is to connect the phone to an “analog telephone adapter.” We’re using the Grandstream HT802, which lets us connect a phone and make VoIP calls. The Grandstream box is connected to a router though an ethernet connection, and then to our PC.

On the PC side, we have to pretend to be a phone service, accept calls using the SIP protocol, and then handle them manually. We’ve integrated the C# library SipSorcery with Unity to handle this. We use FFmpeg encode our audio in the correct format that can be sent to the phone.

This technique gives us a lot of flexibility, and in particular lets us:

• swap in any landline phone if we want a different aesthetic or this one breaks
• specify phone numbers for our characters, and only allow calls to those phone numbers
• send pre-recorded audio when players call our characters
• ring the phone to call players and send pre-recorded audio as hints

We’re also in the process of implementing a subtitle system so that a transcript from the calls show up on the Tilt Five.

Preparation for Halves

A lot of the week was spent preparing for our Halves presentation on Friday.

We wanted to make sure to explain the historical impact of Billy Jo Jive and all of the research we’ve done to hone in on our current experience. We also showed the opening animatic. Unfortunately, the presentation computer had some graphical issues that affected the video playback, but luckily it didn’t affect any other parts of our presentation.

Next week is break, and then we’ll be back to work!