For the night, UCC supplied one of our few projects that actually makes money for the club: the SMS Screen.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the SMS screen, it's basically a set of equipment that allows patrons to send text messages to a number displayed on-screen, and have those messages appear projected on a screen. When I was first introduced to it, I really couldn't see the attraction, but it is apparently a great way to compliment (and insult) your friends with a degree of anonyminity.
WARNING: Some of the below images contain obscenity. Tune out now if you are easily offended.
In its basic configuration, the screen looks something like this (although without the Windows title bar):
When I rolled up to the Leederville to set it up, the AV technician asked if we could alter it a bit, so that he could plug it in to their video overlay system.
Well. With only a keyboard, two virtual consoles and a basic knowledge of GTK and Glade, I managed to alter just about every part of the screen's appearance. The end result looked pretty awesome, actually.
In the image above, only the yellow text (the SMSes and the news/joke/adbar beneath) were generated by our equipment: the moving, um, things behind it are from an AVI file, and the logo at the top (which faded in and out, spun around and did other cool stuff) is a Flash file. You can see it in action in a short (1.1 MB) video I took on the night.
I also took several other photos on the night, some of which contain shots of the SMS screen in action. Remember, the whole point of the obscenity filter is to allow everyone to call the people involved and make animal noises and heavy breathing down the line (this is sarcasm - please don't do it, unless you are really witty).
The screen was ridiculously popular: between 7pm and 12pm, over 750 messages were sent to it. I don't have more statistics yet, because I haven't yet got it back, but I will put some comments in with some interesting and useless numbers.
(Oh, and those of you involved with the creation of the screen might be interested to know that the nice young man from The Leederville said that he was very interested in our equipment. Apparently, doing it with less than $500 worth of gear is far more impressive than Vodafone's several-million-dollar-plus effort at an earlier stage. He has my mobile number and Committee's e-mail.)
One comment
N@ :: Sunday, April 3rd
You did the whole image bakcground thing on the night??
wow, that's pretty impressive, seeing as how much better it looks than the example above!! gonna let me browse through all the messages??...i'd love to recognise some of the numbers :)
