MikeLipton
Latest
Breakfast NY's Mission Control Center merges MLB info with NASA-flair, uses 20 feet of switches and screens
The team at Breakfast NY never leaves us hungry when it merges the digital and physical worlds -- and this time it's created something that hits it out of the park for the start of this year's US baseball season. Here at the Major League Baseball Fan Cave in downtown NYC, the team has just unveiled its space program-inspired Mission Control Center. As creative director and co-founder Andrew Zolty explained, "The idea is try and pull in pretty much everything you can possibly imagine that's going on during the 2013 MLB season, and do it in a way that feels reminiscent of NASA's control room: Mission Control." The 20-foot-long installation houses 30 screens measuring roughly eight inches each. The displays are grouped into two sets of 15 (one side for American League teams and the other for the National League), separated in the middle by a large LCD and a consumer-grade webcam. Below the screens you'll notice a plethora of switches with LEDs, info lights and a trio of gauges. Both sides feature three rows of five screens, each pertaining to one of the 30 MLB teams and their stadiums. At the flick of a switch, the screens display real-time connected data like recent Foursquare check-ins, weather, Facebook Likes and Instagrams, along with team stats, facts and more for each stadium at once. %Gallery-183916% Those smaller screens, by the way, are actually physically modded Android-tablets -- unfortunately, Breakfast wasn't at liberty to tell us exactly which kind they are. Essentially, they are all running custom apps, with support from MLB.TV to pull real-time, live streams from each stadium in the league. In total, we're told that 13 APIs and seven software languages work in conjunction to make up the Mission Control Center. The setup will also allow players visiting the Cave to have live chats with roughly 10 fans at a time who participate from MLB's site (sort of like Google+) -- of course, the chats allow an essentially unlimited number of spectators. Curious for more of the nitty gritty? Join us past the break.
