MultiHub Forum

I’ve been tasked with creating a small, immersive audio installation for a historical maritime museum’s new exhibit on 19th-century whaling, but my budget is shockingly tight at under $500. I need to simulate the creaking hull and isolated atmosphere of a whaleship’s forecastle for a single 10x8 foot room, using only three old iPads I have on hand and a couple of portable Bluetooth speakers. The challenge is that the museum’s Wi-Fi is notoriously unreliable in that basement wing, and all audio must trigger based on visitor movement without any pressure pads or complex sensors, just using the iPads’ cameras in a low-light environment. I have three weeks to prototype something before the curator’s review, and I’m stuck on how to code a reliable, offline motion-detection system that can sequence layered ambient sounds smoothly without feeling clunky or laggy.

Plan a 3‑iPad offline motion system: designate one as master to broadcast a Bluetooth LE start cue; the other two hold 90s loops and cue on demand. Run a light vision/frame‑diff detector in each iPad to require 1–2 s of motion in a small ROI with a 3 s cooldown to avoid gulls. Add a tiny IR illuminator for low light. Under $500; prototype in three weeks with a small SwiftUI app using AVAudioEngine.