A participative light and sound show using mobile phones in crowds

Opphos is a mobile application that creates artistic light and sound effects in order to reflect and enhance the mood and the vibe of an audience during a concert. This application uses the movements of the spectators and the ambient sounds to generate a crowd-sourced light show that reflects the audience's behaviors during an event. It also generates an extra musical instrument by enhancing and propagating cheers and other sounds coming from the crowd.

The goal of Opphos is to create an immersive and collective emotional experience where each person in the audience plays an important role. Opphos uses opportunistic networking to spread information among mobile phones in the audience, and it is therefore perfectly functional in environment where a cellular network is not available or insufficient for the crowd. Depending on the interactions that the user has with the phone (first pumping, swaying and cheering), Opphos can be set to two different modes: The battle mode encourages the crowd to make noise and is designed to help the artist warm up the crowd at the beginning of a concert. On the contrary, the ambiance mode is designed to create a calm and breathtaking light show in rhythm with the swaying movements of the crowd.

Contact: Iza Marfisi-Schottman, Associate Professor at LIUM Computer Science Lab, Université du Maine; iza.marfisi@univ-lemans.fr