The Interactive Dance Club: Avoiding Chaos In A Multi Participant Environment

TL;DR

This paper describes the design and implementation of the Interactive Dance Club, a multi-participant environment that enables users to collaboratively influence music and visuals, aiming for coherence and visual appeal.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interactive environment for multi-user musical and visual experiences and shares insights from its first public demonstration.

Findings

Achieved musically coherent multi-user interactions

Demonstrated effective visual synchronization among participants

Gained practical insights into multi-user interactive design

Abstract

In 1998 we designed enabling technology and a venue concept that allowed several participants to influence a shared musical and visual experience. Our primary goal was to deliver musically coherent and visually satisfying results from several participants' input. The result, the Interactive Dance Club, ran for four nights at the ACM SIGGRAPH 98 convention in Orlando, Florida. In this paper we will briefly describe the Interactive Dance Club, our "10 Commandments of Interactivity," and what we learned from its premiere at SIGGRAPH 98.