The Tech Behind Father's Day @ Microsoft NERD

Here's a quick look at the tech behind today's StarCraft II Event here at Microsoft NERD, aka, The Microsoft New England Research & Development Center.

Ping test, 4 ms. Yep, that's impressive, as is the download and upload speed, by far the best I've seen of all such events I've attended these past roughly 18 months, thank you Microsoft!

1) Interwebs

Hard to overstate how importance of the network is for the success (or failure) of such an event!

See also twitter.com/tinkererguy/status/214431124905144321

2) Set the Scene

Next, let's take a look out the window, using a $99 Esky C5900 IP cam for a live skyline view of Boston across the Charles River, showing the prominent John Hancock and Prudential Tower, making it rather obvious that yes, we're actually in nearby Cambridge MA.

Here's what you see in the live stream at:
www.twitch.tv/nesc2league

Behind the scenes, had to configure the camera for DHCP for the Microsoft wired network, then discover the IP address the DHCP granted using the Esky IP camera super client for C5700/C5900(V526) software, and format the proper rtsc to email off to the XSplit Broadcaster to "Add IP webcam" to his configuration, looking something like this:
rtsp://10.10.11.137/H264

then put my laptop away, and did a little testing, and camera aiming, using just Safari on my iPhone 4 on the local network:

3) Set up the interviews

Here's how it looks behind the scenes:

You can see a large touchscreen (thank you Tobias Drewry of Mesa Mundi Inc.!), and a tripod, and some gaffers tape, and eventually settling on the Logitech C 525. Picked it up for the event coordinator Drogith, with a quick trip to nearby Microcenter, on sale for $49.99. Web site one in stock, indeed, got the last one on the shelf, along with a 10' USB 2.0 extension cable.

Same deal here, XSplit Broadcaster set to the USB 2.0 attached camera, streaming to a private Twitch.tv stream, for the main stage casters to cut over to showing with their main XSplit login, for interviews.

End result looks good!

4) Sit back and enjoy!

Here's the main room, lotsa folks, many HD cameras and projectors all over the ceiling:, really quite a nice facility, looking forward to coming back here for user group meetings (and perhaps more SC2 tournaments) in the future!

Special thanks to the many volunteers who worked so hard Saturday and Sunday to pull off this event, including Drogith (founder/leader), Anacromy, Unctious, Jethro, Senex, Schamtoo, and so many others...