Rnul interactive

The systems were made ​​entirely in max; camera tracking, keying and OpenGL.

interactive-museum-installation-intra-laterna-magica

Interactive museum installation: Intra Laterna Magica

Julien Bayle

-24 systems with OS Windows 7 64bits + 1 server with Windows 2008 server.

-7 arduino boards with 8 buttons + 8 ultrasonic sensors

-a dynamic subtitler for video (using basic .srt files for easy maintenance & change by the customer)

-a scheduler (using UDP datagrams to shutdown the whole exhibition at particular hours all along the years & using Wake On Lan UDP datagrams to wake up all in the morning too)

-a database integration (it provides a system to make Max5 patches knowing what is the language of the visitor's RFID Card)

-full network connections to remote control all patches with UDP datagrams (put the installation stand by mode to save energy, etc)

-specific Arduino firmwares (input reading + output writing)

a-big-max5-permanent-installation-supporting-meditteranean-cinema

A big max5 permanent installation supporting Meditteranean Cinema

All the installations are made with Max. With analog video input of the cameras and digitizers the video image is used to interact with the visitors. The tracking of the interactive table is done with a kinect camera.

old-fashioned-room-at-zeeuws-museum

Old Fashioned Room at Zeeuws Museum

Sarah Angliss

I used Max to create a naturalistic, ever-changing 50 channel sound installation to reanimate this WWII era submarine.

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Reanimating WWII submarine HMS Alliance

Darwin Grosse

Hi David! Thanks for chatting with us. Can you start off by telling us a little about your company, Beaudry Interactive?

Thank you so much for having me here! I’m really excited to have a chance to talk with you and others in the Cycling74 community. I’ve been a Max user since the late 1990’s, so this is quite an honor for me!

I think of all things I’ve had to do in the company, explaining what we do has always been the hardest. Especially if you look at the work we’ve done over the years, it can be challenging to find a through line. Since I have a bit more time than an elevator ride, let me give a little bit of backstory. My background is in performance. Although I do a lot of work in interaction design for live performance, I am a very traditional, classically trained clarinetist. The favorite works that I like to perform are chamber pieces: small intimate ensembles with just a few players, like the Brahms Clarinet Quintet or Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, to name some of my favorites. The experience is both individual and communal at the same time. I thrive on that unspoken dialog with my fellow musicians and the (often absent) composer as we explore a piece, find meaning, and try to find ways to make it our own. 

Now that Beaudry Interactive (b/i) has been around as a company for 10 years, I can now look back and see that it is often that passion and motivation that is behind a lot of the work we do: how do we create experiences that are both communal and personal, experiences that provide handles that allow you reach in and make it your own, all while maintaining the overall intention of the original experience. This applies to our work in theater, dance, music, themed entertainment, experiential marketing, museums, large spectacles and intimate gatherings. That’s a bit of the backstory. 

Now the elevator pitch is we are a small design company based in Los Angeles that specializes in interaction design and performance technology. We are the people in the middle making connections between what people do and their impact on design and story. Not only do we help dream up these experiences, we have the technical chops to actually make it all happen. We code (a lot!), we build custom electronics, we curate (and misappropriate) a lot of different sensing technologies, and we talk to a lot of different show control devices. Some of our clients include Disney (Imagineering, Creative Entertainment, R&D, and the theme parks), Disney Channel, Twentieth Century Fox, Crayola, Diavolo Dance Theater, Sony Pictures, and The Discovery Cube. 

What are some of the things that you've done that you are most proud of?

First, I think I have to be honest and say I am most proud (and genuinely surprised) that we’ve been able to build a company, and make a living, doing this type of work. And don’t think for a moment that I’ve been able to do this all on my own.

I am especially proud of the small team I’ve been able to put together that form the core of our company. Valeria Beaudry, who has a brilliant business mind honed from her past life as a consultant, not only serves project manager for most of our projects and handles most of the business dealings of the company, but also serves as art director on many of our projects. She also owns the company with me. Ryan Dorn, who has been with the company in one form or another since 2009, is a wonderful writer, storyteller, experience designer, “technology curator”, and has always been the one to articulate what’s in our collective heads. And Sean Phillips, who is not only a great programmer (and a fellow Max programmer), he’s a fantastic sound designer, experience designer, and a seemingly endless fountain of ideas. He is also one of the most creative problem solvers I’ve worked with. Together we make a great team whose unique approach to interaction and experience design has clients actively seeking us out, which is a fun position to be in.

But something tells me you were really asking about our work? That’s like asking me to pick which child is my favorite! OK, here are some of my favorites (just don’t tell the others):  

Trunk Show was a blue sky “atmospheric” show for a Major Themed Entertainment Company™. Not only was it the first show we designed and produced ourselves, it was a culmination of all the work we had done in interaction design and real-time show control. Over the 15-minute show there was only 1 cue triggered from back stage, and that was to start the show. All other show elements, light, sound fog, animations, story structure, even a spitting flower (don’t ask), were under the control of the performers, and to some extent, prop-wielding guests.

Transit Space was a collaborative dance piece with the Diavolo Dance Theater (the artistic director for Diavolo, Jacques Heim, was the choreographer for Cirque’s Ka at the MGM in Vegas). This was our first time working with a dance company. What was interesting for us was that in the end we were truly the middlemen helping the dancers and fellow designers make connections between movement, spoken word, sound, music, the giant set pieces and the props. As the show took form, we disappeared and became this invisible (but heavily sensored) hand working behind the scenes. The experience helped us realize our role as interaction designers, and also see hat our tools were just as important for the performers as they were for the audience.

We build a sensor: As a result of our work on Transit Space, we invented an entirely fabric-based, waterproof, bend and pressure sensor that could be embedded in the performers costumes. To date we’ve made over 6000 of these sensors (we have a client that likes them a lot!). Its continuous design and evolution (and often build) has been a company-wide effort.

And last but certainly not least: Inspector Training Course. This was our first venture into the museum world, and certainly not our last. The Inspector Training Course (ITC as the cool kids call it) is a high tech scavenger hunt that teaches kids about sustainability, energy conversation, home safety, and earthquake preparedness. It’s at the Discovery Cube here in Los Angeles, a very hands-on children’s science center/exploratorium. Feedback from it has been tremendous. We’ve even won a couple awards for it! I think the statistic that we are proudest of (and we can verify since we collect a ridiculous amount of statistics on the gameplay!) is that the average time kids are playing the game is 15 minutes! That’s an eternity in the museum world. The experience was so successful we did another version of it for the Discovery Cube in Orange County a year later where the theme was vectors (yup! mosquitos, rats, and other fun disease carriers in your backyard…we clearly get all the cool subject material for kids). And we are now looking into making ITC into a traveling exhibit.

Not being able to share a lot of the work we do. We’ve designed and developed some truly amazing experiences and technology that we’ll never be able to talk about, nor point to (some that I would even put on that list above). This was particularly frustrating in the early years when 100% of our work was under NDA. Our website was pretty sad then, too. Our consolation is that we’ve had good lawyers, so even though we can’t talk about certain projects, we own all the underlying IP and can use it however else we’d like. 

How much of your work is hardware-based, and how much is software?

It’s pretty equally divided between both. Inputs and outputs always need hardware. That stuff in the middle connecting the two is all software. Or put another way: you can’t do interaction design without sensing what people are doing. That requires hardware. You can’t really communicate back to them without some design element (sound, lights, projection, animatronics, pyro!). That’s hardware, too. Tying those together requires some processing and decision making. That’s software. 

What is it about the visual programming paradigm of Max that works particularly well for you and your team?

I think it’s just how our brains work. Before I start any coding I’m always sketching out the show, system, and their relationships spatially (I think David Z. and I share a similar affinity for Omnigraffle, which I use quite a bit for this). It just seems natural to me that my programming environment reflects that. Plus being able to clearly see spatially “output here goes to input there then loops back to this part here” is perfect for how my brain works. It directly mirrors what I’m trying to accomplish in the physical world.

Where is Beaudry Interactive going in the future? What are some of the areas that you are most interested in exploring?

My dream? I really want us to design and build a large scale experience from the ground up. Build a show for ourselves in an old warehouse using all the tools and tricks and ideas we’ve learned and dreamt up over the years and create an experience where all people can say when they leave is “You had to be there!”. Just need to get a big fat check from a generous benefactor. Anybody?

In the meantime, it’s been several years in the making, but I think we are definitely on to something with our interactive show control and design work for more atmospheric entertainment (generally entertainment that isn’t on a stage). A good portion of my summer has been compiling all our work in real-time show control, gesture recognition and control, embedded sensors in props and costumes, microcontrollers, wireless radios, tracking and location systems, etc. into one “ecosystem”. The goal here being able to build shows that are entirely, or largely, performer and audience controlled; a truly “in the moment” experience. There’s really nothing like this out there, and this comprehensive, in the commercial world.

Also we’ve only just begun our work in the museum world. The more we experience it, the more we see that it needs us! Role playing, gamification, storytelling, immersive environments, and cutting edge technology isn’t just the realm of themed entertainment and performance. In order to engage their audiences in new and creative ways, museums are looking outside their dusty bubbles and finding that the same tools and methods used in themed entertainment work really well in the museum world, and we are helping them see that. And in the end there’s only a slight difference in the guest experience. Both go “Yeah! That was fun!” For museums it has the added realization of “Crap! I think I just learned something!”

And honestly, I’m interested in seeing what our current and future clients ask of us! Every project we’ve worked on has been different, from design to programming to sensing to the underlying infrastructure. And there’s always been some element that’s pushed us technically and/or creatively in really interesting directions. I hope that continues for a long, long time.

Many thanks to David Beaudry for his discussion of b/i’s way of approaching the world of interaction design. If you are interested in more information from/about David, you can check out my Art + Music + Technology podcast with him.

Visit the Beaudry Interactive website and get an inside look at the Inspector Training Course museum exhibit.


David talks about his company, their projects and approaches. "Every project we’ve worked on has been different, from design to programming to sensing to the underlying infrastructure."

an-interview-with-david-beaudry

An Interview with David Beaudry

All the individual installations were made ​​entirely with Max. All the elements like  camera/ kinect tracking, openGL, database, videomapping, mxj java for emailing pictures to visitors and so on were processed in programs that automatically start up and ran daily.

interactive-installations-for-the-huygens-exhibition

Interactive installations for the Huygens exhibition

Gregory Taylor

On the way back from our family duties, I asked J. if she minded terribly if we stopped off in Philadelphia. No, it wasn't the desire to have an authentic Philly Cheese Steak (although they're quite good. There's an interesting south Philly variation that includes onions and a tomato-based sauce that's also pretty wonderful) I wanted to visit the Philadelpha Museum of Art in order to fulfill a long-standing wish-visit their Marcel Duchamp collection and see what are, for me, Duchamp's two greatest works: the Large Glass and Etants Donnes: 1. La Chute D'eau 2. Le Gaz D'eclairage....If you're an audio person rather than a museum geek, then the best way to explain this might be to compare the urge to go and actually hear The Well-Tuned Piano with the act of acquiring a documentation of it. Happily, this was just a side trip rather than a major world-spanning pilgrimage, and J. was her usual generous self, so we went.

Of course, I'd seen the pictures for years, and even gone to see Richard Hamilton's (unbroken) copy of the Large Glass at the Tate Modern in London. But it's not the same.

I hate to dig up that hoary old Walter Benjamin essay on Art in the Age of Reproduction, but having the world mediated to you by images or recordings rather than experiences does make things problematic: some works of art, in real life, seem like obscene jokes about scale, while some works seem to positively ache to be larger than their physical selves.

The Duchamp pieces had a kind of fragility about them as physical objects that surprised me as I stood before them. And they were silent. Yeah, I know-that sounds stupid, doesn't it?

The Large glass is a thing made of delicate materials (glass, dust, thread) that show their age. Something shattered into a zillion pieces and then painstakingly reassembled in a big metal frame. The painted studies for portions of the piece that surrounded it in the gallery seemed infinitely more substantial than their final definitively unfinished product. Add to that the idea that its iconography is supposed to be about some kind of Mystery Play about desire viewed through a fanciful set of physical technologies, and you've sort of got a picture of how it looked to me. I found myself thinking of the ways in which all the new media tools patiently awaiting us on our laptops might create things that would, in their own ways, be similarly ephemeral (and similarly frozen by the conventions of their own time). I kept looking at the wiggly handpainted Rube Goldberg diagrams and imagining how they sounded then, and how they would sound now, with the mechanisms gone all rusty and finicky.

Etants Donnes was a different kind of surprise: a big door in a semidarkened room with two little eyeholes. This link sort of describes what you actually see looking through the peephole. It's a singularly eerie thing, staring through those two eyeholes at what looked to me like a dead body holding a flickering gas lamp aloft in a department store diorama. I think that the age of the materials and their state probably reminded me more of something out of a crime scene investigation than I expected. Since Duchamp worked on the thing in secret for years, you've really got nothing to go on except for what you see. But I found myself thinking about sound while staring through the peepholes. There simply isn't any way to see any more of the work (the nude woman's face, for example)--it's the closest visual experience I can think of to the absolute tyranny of audio placement for a listener (the couple in front of me in line spent several minutes stooping and straining to catch a glimpse of her face). Of course, it was silent, too-but I kept imagining what it should sound like. The sound of insects and faraway water? The sounds of traffic or ambient noise from my side of the door?

Of course, the world's got plenty of noise, Duchampwise--music by and about him, and some words from Marcel himself. This should give me me a little space in which to contemplate my personal hidden noise for myself.

While that's all I wanted to say about stuff I saw on my vacation, I'd be seriously remiss if I didn't mention to any brave soul willing to read this far the absolute coolest link in this whole article: If you click here you'll find a complete animated webset of Duchamp's rotoreliefs--his foray into mass-produced kinetic art.

I wanted to visit the Philadelpha Museum of Art in order to fulfill a long-standing wish-visit their Marcel Duchamp collection and see what are, for me, Duchamp's two greatest works: the Large Glass and Etants Donnes: 1. La Chute D'eau 2. Le Gaz D'eclairage.... 

not-wanting-to-say-something-about-marcel

Not wanting to say something about Marcel

David Zicarelli

It was ten years ago this month that we announced our first conference for Max users, which we confusingly named to honor a World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington that took place 35 years earlier. We promised the first Expo ’74 in April 2009 would be “a safe space to show your patch” and we endeavored to make it a reflection of our corporate bias in favor of the unpretentious and quirky. Once attendees arrived at the first Expo, we divided them into groups (naturally based on Max object names) that we proceeded to lead on field trips around San Francisco. That was just the beginning of a three-day patching party that featured a catered science fair and ended with Miller Puckette jamming on electric guitar.

Even in 2009, the world did not need another academic conference about digital media (and ten years later, it really doesn’t need another one). Instead, we took inspiration from events where anyone could feel welcome to show up, talk shop, share tips, and swap stories. From time to time, the Max community has been described as "model train club.” With Expo we consider that a feature not a bug.

Ten years later, Expo ’74 returns for a third iteration that will take place April 26-28, 2019. This time, we’re excited to be partnering with my favorite art museum in the universe, MASS MoCA. We’re hard at work putting together an inspiring program of presentations, workshops, and installations. Naturally, we’ll host another science fair. And a field trip? We can’t say for sure yet, but it’s definitely a possibility.

Despite the fact that it’s not exactly an Uber ride away from a major international airport, MASS MoCA promises to be an amazing venue for this event. One highlight among many for me would have to be recently opened Building 6 with its collection of large-scale immersive works by Laurie Anderson and James Turrell. Next to the Laurie Anderson installations, the museum created a room full of playable instruments constructed by Gunnar Schonbeck. Gunnar was a teacher of mine and his community-based approach to music-making was hugely influential. Perhaps you’ll be influenced to imagine how these instruments might exist in the Max domain. Beyond the curated exhibitions, we’re also excited about the opportunities afforded by the museum's variety of cool public spaces.

We've prepared a guide to help you plan for your Expo experience including hotel options and transportation advice.

We’re not quite ready to unveil everything we’re planning, but I am happy to announce that for this forthcoming Expo we’ve engaged our former colleague Luke DuBois to serve as Artistic Director. With his unrivaled knowledge of work done with Max, Luke seemed to us to be a particularly appropriate choice for this role given that the software is 30 years old this year. Luke is working on putting together a diverse lineup of presenters that will reflect both the historical significance and future directions of Max.

Ultimately, we go to the effort to put on Expo ’74 to connect to the extraordinary work being done by the Max community and engage in an unmediated conversation about where the software should go next. In that spirit, all of your friends at Cycling ’74 are looking forward to seeing you in North Adams next April.

Learn more about Expo '74 and buy your ticket now!

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Cycling ‘74 invites you to join us at Expo ‘74 2019. It will take place April 26-28 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, USA.

announcing-expo-'74

Announcing Expo '74

Tom Hall

Beaudry Interactive (b/i) is a small operation running out of David Beaudry’s home in sunny Los Angeles, CA, USA. When I say small, I’m merely referring to the crew size - four key individuals working at b/i in their day-to-day operations. Don't be fooled by the personnel count - by no means at all are the projects they’re working on small. 

I dropped by Beaudry Interactive to spend some time talking with David directly about the life cycle of one of their projects in order to get a sense of where and why Max is involved. David has been using Max for almost 20 years - initially getting into it as a means to extend the possibilities of his clarinet playing by adding sensors and triggers to control lights and other content. (Does that sound familiar to anyone?) From there, he started pitching on gigs for Disney and using Max exclusively to complete them in the early days - drawing on the one programming language he knew best.

For this article, David walked me through a project that involved Max almost exclusively: The Inspector Training Course presented at the Discovery Cube by the Discovery Science Foundation here in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles - the first of its kind.

David told me that the initial pitch for the Inspector Training Course was the most difficult part of the project. Although he and Sean could imagine the final piece, convincing a panel of stone-faced museum curators how a system involving hundreds of moving parts is going to work (take a look at the project breakdown below later on and you'll see what I mean) with only a singular example as part of the pitch is difficult, to say the least. The curator's main concern had to do with the children being in awe of the technology - the Surface Pro devices they'd be using as their interface to a lot of the interactive experience - rather than focusing on the content itself. As David so quickly convinced them, children and young people these days don’t look at technology like other generations - these items have been there since they were born, and were merely another  extension of the self for them. As David said himself, they were asking the DCLA to take a leap of faith in Beaudry Interactive. Thankfully they did!

So... what is the Inspector Training Course?

Set in a 2,200 sq. ft. open layout California Bungalow, the Inspector Training Course experience is a technologically ground-breaking scavenger hunt that teaches kids about conservation and sustainability to further the museum’s environmental stewardship goals. Visitors are outfitted with their own tablets and go on immersive quests to master the skills of a Home Inspector. The tablet is part teacher, part scorekeeper, and part guide. It provides bits of information as needed, directs the kids to challenges, and asks questions based on what they’ve learned and observed. Along the way, visitors meet animated characters embedded into set pieces that give important facts to help on the quest. Guests also engage with physical “work it out” challenges ranging from the power consumption of different types of bulbs to the effectiveness of low-flow shower heads. The ultimate goal for the kids is to earn badges and become “Super Inspectors”. Average game time is 15 minutes, with many kids playing multiple quests at a time. 

With David’s 18 years of experience programming with Max (As he says, "Yikes!") on a wide variety of projects, he knew Max was capable, had a good idea how to build the various components that were needed for the experience and what their function would be, and how they would all talk to each other from very early on. His approach with Max was the same here as it is on every project: Start with Max as the center of the system, then begin to work out on the individual components (the tablet interface, game server, SQL connection, email server, docent machine, etc.). b/i’s take on many of these projects completed in the past runs like this: If it can be done in Max, great. If not, Max has so many ways it can reach out to other apps and programming environments (e.g. network messages, scripts, specialized tools like Syphon and Spout, etc.) that b/i just looks for a different tool to accomplish that specific job. David works on the basis of the idea that Max is the conductor - you just bring in a special guest artists to help with particular solos.

The time required to complete the Inspector Training Course was just seven months - from May to November of 2014. David explained that the first couple months were key, focusing initially on the “book” work: 

Figuring out and detailing the guest experience and gameplay


Figuring out the underlying technical infrastructure


Flow analysis of how guests would interact and move through the space (There were to be more that 50 challenges in 2000 sq. foot space, so b/i needed to make sure that individual areas didn't contain bottlenecks or too many challenges in a particular area.)


During this initial development time they also did little internal “technical” tests to make sure they could do what they wanted to do (or perhaps more accurately, what they said they could do), and then finding those special “guest solo artists” that they needed to bring in where Max wasn’t the best tool. 

And of course lots of meetings with clients and stakeholders. Not only was this phase key to making sure everyone understood the scope of the experience, it was invaluable ensuring all the stakeholders had bought into the experience. Especially on such tight timelines, once b/i start programming and building media, and the fabricators start building the exhibit, there isn’t much time (or budget) to “figure things out”. David points out that it’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of tweaking along the way, but the overall structure of the experience needs to be solid before moving on to the next phase. Then after programming they jumped into design and development, where they worked simultaneously on graphics/interface design and technical design & programming while the fabricators started building the house. Lots of mock-ups, a couple playtests, lots of testing and integration and scaling the system up. That was about 3 months. Then they went into install (6 weeks) and test & adjust (2 weeks). David mentioned it was quick and scary with them only being on-site a couple weeks before opening. That was the first time they were able to bring the entire system together (all the tablets, displays, tracking system, etc.). 

I asked David about any roadblocks they hit during the Inspector Training Course. To my surprise, he replied that there wasn’t really anything that they couldn’t quickly get around. In the past, b/i had done a lot of show control and interactive storytelling for themed entertainment and live performances before, so they had a nice library of tools they could call upon as well as experience in integrating lots of different components into a single experience. These days, they rarely start from scratch. The biggest challenge they found was scaling all the media playback to work on a tablet (albeit a nice tablet, but certainly not the video servers they are used to running). Lots of playing with codecs and developing some cool tools to help maintain constant frame rates at a high resolution was required. In the end they were humming along at 30fps @ 1080p which was quite lovely (as well as being important for the experience). Outside of Max, the biggest challenge was configuring the tablets and PCs so that no one could mess with them but b/i. They came up with a lot of tricks (through a lot of trial and error) to make sure kids (and staff) couldn’t exit the application and start mucking about.

I asked David to outline the installation flow for the Inspector Training Course. Here's how it looks:

Focus of the gameplay is on 50 Surface Pro 2 tablets. They run the game fairly autonomously except for some key components/messages from the game server.

A docent machine is used to check in/out the tablets and add some personalization (such as the guest’s first name).


A game server. Its main function is to parse and forward along tracking coordinates to each tablet. It also broadcasts messages as needed to all the tablets, writes data to the SQL database (we gather a lot of stats on gameplay on the tablets for each guest that then gets passed to the game server, which then writes the data to a remote SQL server). The game server also coordinated wireless messages for some of the physical challenges that were wirelessly connected to the system.


A freestanding email server that allowed guests to email inspection checklists to themselves.


A couple “selfie” stations for kids/families that got high enough scores to become super inspectors (the selfies could also be done on the tablets).


A video server that drove 9 HD displays. This was the Super Inspectors wall, which included pictures, badges earned, and scores for the participants.

All the CPUs were wired to the local network b/i set up. Tablets and a few of the physical challenges were all wireless, and everything talked to everything else in one form or another.

Here's what the total tech breakdown looked like (Wow!):

50 x Surface Pro 2 tablets (in addition to the touch screen and CPU, we also used both front and rear embedded cameras in gameplay)
1 x HP CPU (docent machine)
2 x intel NUC’s (selfie kiosks)
1 x intel NUC (email station)
1 x custom CPU with a beefy GPU assembled in-house (Used for the Super Inspector Wall)
9 x HD monitors (super inspector wall)
2 x Logitech webcams (selfie stations)
1 x Mac Pro (game server, game metrics, connecting to SQL server)
1 x location tracking system (hub + 13 “antennas”)
50 x trackers (1/tablet)
5 x reference location tags (embedded around the house for use by the tracking system)
1 x Ruckus WiFi network (controller with 2 access points)
1 x Cisco network “smart” switch (for all wired network connections)
1 x battery backup for check-in/out area (docent machine, NUCs, video wall; aka “the truck”)
1 x battery backup for game server & tracking system (aka “the rack”)
1 x Teensy 3.0 microcontroller with ublox wifi radio mounted on custom PCB (thermostat challenge)

Every CPU/tablet ran Max. The two tablets actually ran two Max applications each.

There were many video playback devices that function separately from the gameplay itself and and are not connected to b/i's system (plus they weren’t responsible for those in the LA version of the game "...although they wanted them tied into our system..." says David). There was also a SQL server somewhere on the premises building that they only knew of by its IP address - they never actually saw the hardware (it was provided by the museum and used for many other purposes as well).

The answer to my final question to David was a real shock: When I asked about the fail-safes they had in place for the Inspector Training Course, the answer was a big fat ZERO. Zip. Nada. Nothin'.

David smiled and said, “We’re living on the edge.” The decision to have no fail-safes was largely driven by budget (Welcome to the museum world). However, knowing that in advance, b/i built the system to accommodate as much as they could. 95% of the processing for the experience is on the tablet. That means that if one tablet goes down, there are 49 others - often, a reboot is all is needed. The other systems weren’t doing anything particularly complex, which was intentional. It made them easy to build, and - more importantly - easy to test and debug. The attraction has been running since November of 2014. It's estimated that it has been down a total of an hour - and that was primarily in the beginning!

So there you go - an up close and personal look on the life cycle of a Max project. It was incredibly enlightening, to say the least. I’m very impressed with what David is able to achieve with Max (and I literally see hundreds of Max projects across my desk in any given week). David and b/i certainly prove that you don’t need to be a big company to play big, you just need to know your tools well and use them wisely. (Check out Darwin's interview with David for a closer look at all his work.)


David Beaudry of Beaudry Interactive walks us through a project that involved Max almost exclusively: The Inspector Training Course presented at the Discovery Cube by the Discovery Science Foundation - the first of its kind.

start-to-finish-an-inside-look-at-a-max-based-museum-experience

Start to Finish: An Inside Look at a Max-based Museum Experience

aartcore

The system was entirely running on Max/MSP/Jitter with the use of different tracking and computer vision objects.

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