Bucking bronc exhibit

Permanent installation at National Cowgirl Museum, Texas, developed with West Office Exhibition Design.

You saddle up and press a button to record a 10-second bronc ride, which is then automatically edited into an old newsreel and played back. You then get a printed login for the website (with a still frame from your ride) which you use to download your movie from home.

This exhibit turned out to be the single most complex and challenging project I've ever done, and I've done some fairly complicated ones. But it turned out to be a fantastic experience for visitors - by all accounts the most popular exhibit in the museum. It provides a personalized visitor experience that extends beyond the visit. And it runs itself.

The mission, as with the poster exhibit, was to create a fun hands-on activity which fully immerses the visitor in the cowgirl spirit. There have been some fantastic rodeo cowgirls with incredible stories, and this provided an opportunity to give some bronc-riding pointers from them, as well as to show some great old rodeo footage.

So we decided to put visitors into the rodeo arena, and into the old newsreel footage. Safety issues of course immediately came to the fore, and we decided against an electrical bull like those in bars. We found 'Bullmaster' which is like a full-sized version of the playground spring-based ride, and is used for rodeo training. Maltbie Associates (the fabricator) sculpted this beautiful horse to go onto the base, the museum added real cowgirl saddle and bridle, and the whole thing was set onto 10 inches of blue padding, making it sort of look like a swimming horse.

So far, so good. Now, here's where the tech comes in. The bronc is in front of a greenscreen, like the poster exhibit, and there is an video camera inside a case made to look like an old movie camera; and a computer in a crate on the floor. There is a 37" plasma monitor facing both rider and the entry area to the exhibit.

The greenscreen removal is not done on the live video feed as in the Poster exhibit, but processed afterward. Compositing, editing into a new clip, and saving a Quicktime movie takes about 30 seconds on the 933MHz G4 - a long time if you're concerned with maximum visitor throughput. We use that 30 seconds to tell the visitor to go to the museum's web site, where they can download the movie.

The completed movie plays back and a ticket is printed, with login and password, so that only the ticket holder can view the ride. Every night, the bronc compresses and uploads the movies to the web server. The web component was added fairly late in the process; originally, rides were to play back on a second monitor, but it was eliminated. The instructional footage was also to run on the second monitor, but we were not able to secure the rights in time. Instead, some printed tips appear on a graphic panel at the entrance.

Quicktime has all of the necessary editing capabilities built in, and Herb Diamant modified his f3 Xtra so we could automatically add tracks and edit clips together . (Compositing is done with a Quicktime plug-in from Buena Software.)

There were USB conflicts, and we switched printers and serial converters. To upload the movies, we originally tried the FTP Xtra but it proved unstable, so I switched to Applescript and added a step to run the movies through Quicktime Player to compress them. Jumping into Applescript cold, very late in the game, was an adventure, but it was something we had considered early on, and Mac guru Steve Godun had previously written some Applescripts for kiosk Macs, which I was able to use as a starting point. Applescript is fairly simple (especially after wrestling with Lingo, Director's scripting language) and in fact, I learned a ton of that too on this project, thanks to Dan Cummings who did the coding. When his phase ended, we did a line-by-line walkthrough of all the code, since I knew I would have to update it later.

There were some difficulties with the exhibitry too. We had made a full-size mockup of the exhibit, and this served us well. But due to delays beyond our control, we were not able to install and test fully until just days before the opening. One piece of hardware we were not able to test ahead of time was the transmitter connecting the button to the show controller. To avoid running wires through the flexible shaft in the center of the bronc, a wireless method was chosen - literally, a garage door opener (pictured, upper right). It eventually worked fine, but as it was quickly being hooked up the night before opening, it apparently sent 110 Volts over its data connection, instantly destroying, in the following order: the show controller, serial converter, computer, and camera. The software was installed and working, and when I went to boot up for opening, it was odd to find nothing working. We were extremely fortunate to find a spare camera at the local Cirtuit City, and to have on-hand a spare show controller and Mac, and I was acutally able to have it up and running about halfway through the members' preview.

Further information including technical details are here.

Here is an interesting, similar project, done by a team in Hong Kong in 2003.