BRIDGE COMMAND
Parabolic Theatre
London
2024
SERVICES:
Show Control Design
Game Mechanics
Consultancy
Software Development
Programming
Tech Installation
Training
About
A live interactive experience where audiences get to play the crew of a starship
Summary
This project pushed the boundaries of what was possible in a live experience. A fully kitted-out starship set, just like one from a sci-fi series, complete with bridge deck, view screen, engineering, habitation & escape pods. The experience is closer to a LARP or a real live video game than a piece of immersive theatre or escape room.
The System
Bringing The Video Game To Life - “Interactables”
The engine at its heart was a video game, Empty Epsilon, controlled by one in-person game master. The computer game could not control live show technical systems, however, so another solution was required.
Our show control system provided the bridge between the video game and the technical effects in the show, installed by the lighting & sounds depts, so that the technical systems could instantly react to events and actions in the video game: when the ship took damage, the lights would flicker and the walls would reverberate; when the ship fired its lasers, players could hear the guns firing. COGS also controlled all the physical “interactables”:real parts of the ship the players could interact with, like fuel rods for storing the ship’s energy, coolant running in the reactor, the onboard self-destruct system, and hand-scanner controlled automatic doors. Real-world interaction with these props would instantly feedback to the video game, so if players loaded in a new fuel cell, the ship’s energy would instantly increase to reflect the new fuel; if players pulled out a physical fuse for an integral system, that system would no longer be usable in the computer game, and voice alerts would alert the ship’s crew that the system was down.
Communications
We also developed an entirely separate communications control system, cueing the video and sound department systems to connect different microphones and cameras to different screen positions, so that different crew members could talk to each other across the ship. COGS dashboards allowed the game masters to be in control of all these systems throughout the game at the touch of a button.
Conclusion
It all came together to make the ship feel genuine and reactive when players took decisions. We can say with total confidence that this project just wouldn’t have been possible without our show control system running it.
