Recognising the growing applications for Open Show Control (OSC), Orbital Sound and Nemesis Research have launched hardware capable of giving designers, technical departments and stage-management simple and complete access to OSC’s capabilities.
OSC is becoming an important and transformational protocol for musical performance and show control applications, picking up where Midi tails off and integrating network control with non-audio products. Despite already being adopted across a wide range of highly relevant applications from musical expression, robotics and video performance interfaces to professional audio and lighting systems, distributed music systems and inter-process communication, to date there has been no easy way to harness its capabilities. The R&D teams at Orbital Sound and Nemesis have spent the past 18 months working on an innovation that fundamentally changes this picture.
OSCA from Nemesis Research and Orbital Sound is a pioneering development, unlocking OSC’s interoperability, accuracy and flexibility. The OSCA range delivers easy-to-use options for controlling multiple devices such as lighting consoles or rigging motors, sound desks or video software, removing the need for high-cost central servers or complex show control infrastructures, while adding the ability to trigger events manually from multiple locations and control non-OSC equipped devices via contact closure.
From a design perspective, OSCA claims a number of firsts: it enables the seamless integration of non-OSC devices, broadening the application range and massively enhancing the viability of OSC control options, and allows manual commands to be sent from an intuitively designed set of simple programmable buttons (simplifying show control while opening up new device control options). The team has also designed an embedded and uniform user interface, providing powerful yet simple set up tools from a laptop, together with updates and upgrades directly to each OSCA device over the internet.
The first two products in the series are the OSCA-R5 5-Way OSC Programmable Button Box, featuring five IP67 rated buttons that can be easily programmed to execute a range of OSC commands through simple programming of the onboard interface. Multiple OSCA-R5 button units can be deployed on a single OSC network, allowing complex and creative control scenarios to be achieved in a robust and coherent fashion. Hundreds of applications include controlling third-party products such as Q-Lab, ETC EOS lighting consoles, CSC, d&b Soundscape, OSC equipped mixing consoles and Yamaha’s new DME7.
The OSCA-O4 4-Channel OSC Relay Output box is a multiple command destination show control solution that features OSC Network input, POE or 5V DC powering and four independent ‘volt-free’ relays. It enables control of devices that require a simple contact closure to activate commands by converting the OSC command to relay close, relay open, or momentary action. Applications range from sending commands to the GPI input of non-OSC equipped mixing consoles to opening a door lock, boiling a kettle, triggering a Kabuki drop or mechanical automation control.
‘OSC has huge value for show control applications, but in theatre we haven’t been able to take real advantage of this,’ Orbital Sound’s Chris Headlam explains. ‘We love a challenge and decided that the futuristic option was to design something completely new that would give us the features and functionality that our industry needs. Above all, our focus was on making OSCA really easy to use and set up, harnessing all the power and flexibility of OSC and squeezing it into a small box capable of being powered over Ethernet.
‘We spent the festive season testing the OSCA range at a number of secret locations up and down the country, enabling us to move from simple Q-Lab and CSC control to comprehensive video and lighting installation control. At Orbital and Nemesis, our cross-industry activity enables us to see the entire big picture – we live the reality of the onsite real world, we see how hard it is to join everything up and how imperative it is to be bullet reliable. This was an important part of our design mission and how we approached creating the concept behind OSCA. It unlocks and delivers all the power and versatility of OSC but you don’t need to be a network expert or software rocket scientist to drive it.’
The OSCA product range is designed and manufactured in the UK.
