Audience Awakening

A live-survey application built for St. Andrew's Episcopal School, Austin, TX for their performance of Spring Awakening, fall 2019.

Instructions to the audience

As part of our show’s exploration of difficult topics through the framework of Theatre of the Oppressed, the audience is invited to participate. Using your mobile device, visit {{ APPLICATION HOSTED URL HERE }} in your browser.

Before the show starts, you will see a note that you have successfully connected. Keep the page open while you turn your screen off and on so you can get back to it quickly. Throughout the show, questions will be projected. Open your device to vote on answers and see how others responded.

About the application

This Node application provides three displays:

• Participant screen: mobile-optimized for voting and seeing answers.
• Presenter screen: projector-optimized for displaying instructions, questions, and results.
• Admin screen: desktop-optimized for controlling the contents of the other two, pushing prompts to clients and data to the presenters.

Installation

During the production, this application will be hosted on dedicated infrastructure.

Local installation (only tested on Linux machines)

1. Install nvm
2. Clone repository and cd into it
3. nvm install to get the specified version of Node
4. nvm use to activate it
5. npm install to install collect dependencies
6. npm install -g nodemon for local development (Nodemon enables server process restart on changes)

Running the service

• npm run start will start the server process
• npm run dev will do so using Nodemon for auto restart

For debugging information, set the environment variable DEBUG to either * for all information, or audience* for information only from libraries in this application. Example:

DEBUG=audience* npm run dev

Unless otherwise overridden, the service listens on port 3000 on all interfaces.

Usage

When the service running, visit:

• / is the default path and shows the participant display
• /present is the projector path that shows a read-only display of instructions, questions, and results
• /sm is the stage manager's console for controlling the application
• /debug shows 3 side-by-side iframes with each of these displays for easier development and testing. There's also a link to pull a data dump of current state information.

Stage Manager Instructions

1. Preshow, open the /sm display and activate the Preshow cue.

• Optionally, use Projector Blackout if the projector needs to display dark.

2. For a question cue, click the numbered button for the question that should be dispatched.
3. To display the results of a poll, click Present Results
4. After a delay, click Close Question to encourage the audience to turn their screens off again.

• Optionally, use Projector Blackout
• I'd recommend leaving the state on Close until the next question.

5. Repeat from step 2 as needed.
6. Be sure to end on the Postshow cue. This page will still be open on participants' phones when they first turn them on after the show, this is a "thank you" message.

• Keep Postshow engaged until time to repeat from step 1 at the next performance.

Troubleshooting

If something goes wrong:

• Given how fast this application was built, it was primarily tested on Chrome. If you're using a different browser, give Chrome a shot.
• If the presenter/projector screen lags:
  • Consider what browser it is using.
  • Make sure it is plugged in (battery modes can throttle page activity)
  • Try clicking into / focusing the window.
  • Reload the presenter screen.
  • If possible, connect the presenter screen to the internet using ethernet instead of the venue's wifi.
• Visit the /debug page to see a sample participant, presenter, and admin display.
  • Use the Data dump link on the debug display to get a status report of the active data in the system.
  • Use the Reload all clients button on the debug display to force all clients to reload the page. This is a heavy hammer!
• @TODO: Is there a way to restart the dyno?

Editing

Currently, questions are stored in vote-questions.js directly.

License and Copyright

It's complicated.

• The content in this application (questions and respones) are taken from publicly available statistics, please refer to their sources for using those data properly.
• The visual design elements of this application were created by Taylor Smith as work for hire to St. Andrew's and are owned exclusively by SAS and cannot be reused.
• The code for this application is a bit sketchy in its initial implementation, but the code is absolutely reusable if you want to copy parts of it for your own use. Maybe down the line I can separate the proprietary elements to license it properly, but I can't do that at this time. Learn from it, improve upon it, and go make great theatre.
• Spring Awakening was performed by special permission from Music Theatre International.