I’m designing a show coming up that will likely involve a large number of iPhones using StageCaller to fire ringtones etc. It has come up that we might also like to use the phones to do some creative lighting design — i.e., go black on stage and just use the phones for light and maybe have the screens change color at key moments.
I know of at least one other app that can probably do this, but the interface isn’t as nice as StageCaller’s and doesn’t incorporate into QLab as easily. What would be great is if I could load some colored backgrounds or other images into the Dropbox folder and use StageCaller to fire them like sound cues. Is this at all within the realm of possibility?
hmm - neat idea… but its a bit outside what stagecaller was created for… but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it…
lemme toy with this over the next day or two and see what happens - I’m fairly certain that you’d need to have all iOS devices be unlocked (meaning no lock screen) and running the app in order for this to work as requested, and it’ll be a nightmare for the prop master - I’m guessing that you’ll need more than 5 iOS devices for your production (which is all the standard apple account purchase allows)… I’ll take a look at the apple bulk purchase plan (if you’re interested) and see if I can offer you something that fits your needs and is within your budget
Not sure yet how many phones we’ll have — it may be as few as five, or it may be more. (Though since we probably don’t have the budget to buy new phones, they may very well just be borrowed from people working on the show, so we’d be buying StageCaller under several different Apple IDs anyway … Absolutely not ideal, but we don’t have much of a budget on this one.)
Certainly one of the wonderful things about StageCaller is that it works even when the device is locked. But it still lights up the screen in this scenario, yes? Is there maybe some way that this capability could be extended to show other images? I don’t know anything about the programming involved, so I’m just thinking out loud here. Obviously needing to have the app active and the phone unlocked, while doable, is a bit less failproof.
I should clarify that I’m not in a position to commission an app, as in support the development process beyond the cost of purchasing licenses. But if this is a feature that you could see a place for in StageCaller or maybe a related app, and you’re willing to have a go at it, I would gladly purchase licenses and use it on this show. I’m sure other users could make use of it as well, if only for things like customizing a “caller ID” picture to show up on the phone etc.
So let me know what you think. Either way, I’m excited to be using StageCaller on this show — as a piece all about social media, interacting with phones is central to the show and it’ll be great to have a reliable way to control them all.
What about even being able to control what screen appears on the ring/vibe notification? Wondering if you could load an image that looks like a real notification - i.e photo of someone, or conversation bubble appearing on lock screen. Is this already possible?