To study what we will be expecting in the installation, we branched off to various nightclubs and sizeable bars in and around the city of Plymouth to check out the size, dimensions, suitability and also to measure what sort of audience we are going to target our installation at. Presuming that the sort of crowd will be young (at least of legal drinking age and above, but particularly also, students), we then had an idea about what we will be dealing with in terms of popularity, as well as what sort of requirements we will have to meet.
Because many young people, especially students, will be into latest, immersive and intriguing technologies, our dance floor installation will be without a doubt suitable for the audience. The space in which we are to place the installation at will be very crowded, but nonetheless it will also suit our specification very well, because not only is our installation designed to be fun and immersive, it is also designed to be influenced by the crowd, so basically, it makes them the 'DJ' because the installation is controlled by the crowd themselves, especially when it comes to making beats, basslines, rhythm and sound with special visual effects thrown in at the same time. At the same time, we took various photos (albeit on a low-quality built-in phone camera, but still captures the idea as many will probably have benign phone cameras, although many are anyways switching to better models and some even bring proper compact digital cameras with them) whilst I did a sound sample in a bar to highlight how busy our environment will be (link will be at the bottom).
However, the nightclub environment isn't without space issues. Because the environment will obviously be busy, placement of equipment and wiring will have to be carefully thought out before any implementation can occur, as well as researching the venue. But this should not really be the issue, especially in a large-scale nightclub, because this is what we are targeting this installation at, but we also have to address health-and-safety concerns at the same time, as per law and instinct.
In this example of a generic nightclub, this floor plan gives an impression of how our installation will be laid out in this environment. Although it really depends on how the nightclub dance floor is laid out, and also the size of the room as well, this is a typical representation of a generic nightclub environment that will accommodate all the needs and requirements of the specification. In this floor plan, the motion detectors are placed underneath the floor, with the addressable sensors and cameras placed strategically in order to provide a better triangulation of the dance floor in order to optimise the ambient lighting and randomly-generated images, which builds up the atmosphere of the environment, in addition to inputs generated by the sequencers, which are used by the general public to create his/her/their own music to dance to.
Link to group research: https://tulip.plymouth.ac.uk/Module/IDAT101/Wiki/FunkyTown.aspx
Link to sound recording: http://bit.ly/idat101recording
