Our Big Screens project, Terra Nova is in full swing. We have a rough composition of the background image. We also have a server up and running to receive incoming SMS messages to control the characters on the screen.
The server is using Node.js and Express, which is linked to the Twilio API for telephony services. The repository for the server is available on github.
Oya and I are going to do a couple tests to see if the machines that will be running our project can handle video playback in tandem with the Processing Sketch. Dan Shiffman suggested using a still image for the background, and animating .png files to ease the load on the machines.
Another technical issue to tackle is getting Processing to retrieve the SMS data from the server and using it to determine character placement on the screen, which I don’t foresee being too difficult to accomplish. The challenge is going to be animating the characters within Processing to move naturally.