Challenge
For Halloween 2025 we produced our first full immersive experience, Playhouse of the Dead. The narrative called for the main character Yar to magically ‘seize control’ of parts of the room at precise times during the show. This meant not only triggering lighting changes, but also simultaneously controlling screen content and audio from multiple digital and hybrid installs. With minimal budget we had to figure out a control system based on the consumer grade hardware available to us.
What we did
It’s not recommended to network a show over WiFi, if the WiFi goes down the show is in trouble, however we took a calculated risk in this case as it saved us time, reduced our cable runs and removed the expense of a dedicated lighting desk.
The interactive installs dotted around the space each had a PC so it was relatively easy to control the lights using USB to DMX converters in combination with Touchdesigner.
However, the experience also included arcade game emulators and unusual user interfaces like the Sinden Light Gun. Getting these elaborate installations networked was a different story! The game emulators themselves are black boxes that interface with low-level OS APIs, so controlling video and audio outputs remotely posed a tough challenge.
True to its reputation as the Swiss army knife of languages, Python provided the answer. The pynput library let us remotely block and reinstate user control input, while pycaw’s audio utilities gave us process-level programmatic control of sound: we could remotely mute a game, for example, while Ableton Live continues to output audio on the same machine.
Outcome
This bespoke hybrid WiFi network allowed us to ‘haunt’ each install at precise moments during the show, creating the illusion that the whole room was under the control of Yar, a malignant entity from another dimension.
We also saved time and money with less cabling and no lighting desk.
Learnings
Wireless tech has developed a lot over the past few years, so much so that industry grade fixtures such as the Roxx E.show come with bluetooth and WIFI connectivity built in. It’s more reassuring to hardline the system but in certain situation, where install time and budget are concerned, going wireless has its advantages.
Given our time and budget constraints, we took a risk and used the venue’s WiFi network to connect everything. Thankfully the network was solid, however next time, to mitigate reliance on the wider web we’d use a sandboxed router and create our own local network.
When going wireless like this, Touch Designer’s purpose-built TD In/Out networking operators are… not great. Though they now use TCP/IP, their behaviour is more UDP-like: they don’t really handle packet acknowledgement, and certainly don’t report dropped packets. They’re more suited to streaming media, where the odd dropped frame or sample would go unnoticed, than to a networked control system where a missed event could be a show stopper.
Despite the low budget and rapid development the show ran successfully and we’re looking to re-develop it for a longer run next year. In future iterations, we’ll build our own local Websockets-based system that manages dropouts and error recovery better, as well as unwanted ‘hauntings’ like windows automated updates!
Further Reading
- Hardware for controlling light with Touchdesigner. ‘Chauvet DMX AN2’ – video review
- pynut Python library
- pycaw Python library
- ROXX E.Show light fixture