The application 

This application is a typical museum application where three paintings of famous Dutch masters are on display. Additional information is shown on a video display. If no visitor is present, each painting is being lit sequentially. If a museum visitor selects a painting by pressing its image on a touch screen, the focus shifts to this painting and the video display shows additional information about that painting.

The components

This small interactive system includes (apart from three beautiful paintings) the following components:

• Three DMX controlled LED lights, highlighting the paintings;
• A Visual Productions LPU-2 entry level architectural lighting controller;
• A Visual Productions Kiosc Touch wall mount touch screen;
• A BrightSign media player;
• A generic video display, HDMI connected to the BrightSign player

Component description

The LPU-2 is an entry level architectural lighting controller. With its companion app Cuety, lighting scenes (‘cues’) or a list of scenes (called ‘playback’) can be programmed. Cuety can control both static and dynamic lighting, a library of over 4,500 different lighting fixtures is included. Once all lights have been programmed with Cuety, the LPU-2 can be controlled with 3rd party equipment using the Application Programming Interface. This API includes commands that may be sent over the network and can for example start a playback, jump to a cue and change intensity. LPU-2 is compatible with OSC, UDP, TCP and HTTP protocol.
Kiosc Touch is a wall mount touch screen interface. With the free Kiosc Editor app any user interface containing elements like buttons, faders, labels, simple or complex, can be designed. Imported images may be used as background, logo or even as a button (as we do here). Kiosc Touch is UDP and OSC compatible and was designed to have no editing capability, thus being a fool-proof interface that can be presented to non-technical persons.

BrightSign is the market leader in solid state multi media players, and used often in museums. Being UDP compatible and accepting a multitude of image and video formats, it is a versatile and robust media player. Visual Productions is a BrightSign Technology Partner.

How the system works

First, all hardware had to be programmed and configured. These steps show you how:

• First, the paintings were attached to the panel and the LED lights and drivers were positioned;
• Content that should be running on the BrightSign was designed: regular jpg images show an image of the painting and information about that painting. Three jpgs were created, one for each painting;
• Three simple lighting cues were made, each one lighting a painting. For this the Cuety app was used. Cues were stored automatically in the LPU-2;
• A Kiosc Touch layout was designed, including images of each painting. These image elements are used as a button. A master fader was added for adjusting the overall lighting level;
• In the BrightSign programming software BrightAuthor a show file is created that, after power on, starts playing the jpg images in a carousel. Each image is associated with a unique UDP message which recalls the corresponding cue in the LPU-2.

What happens if a someone presses a button on Kiosc:

• If an ‘image’ button on Kiosc is pressed, it sends a UDP message to the BrightSign player;
• This UDP message forces the BrightSign to display the requested information image and to send and UDP message to the LPU-2 to switch to the related cue. This  cue switches on the LED lighting behind the painting;
• When no button is pressed on Kiosc Touch for 10 seconds, the BrightSign player is programmed to revert to carousel mode, highlighting the paintings in subsequent order again, until another button is pressed on Kiosc Touch.

More information 

Visual Productions is the manufacturer of LPU-2, an entry level architectural lighting controller, and Kiosc Touch, a wall mount touch screen interface. A full range of other lighting controllers is available which support DMX, Art-net, sACN, Ki-Net and DALI. For larger systems and system integration projects RDMSplitters are available in two versions.  an i/o expansion interface, a 6-button panel and a timecode reader/generator/converter complement the product line. All products can be found at the Visual Productions website.