the observer field is listening

The best crowd participation I’ve built doesn’t ask the crowd to do anything. They point their phone at themselves, and they’re in the show.

That’s entanglement — the audience mode in qualia. I open a “field” (really just a room), a QR goes up on the projection, and anyone who scans it lands at /lab/entangle on their own phone. No app, no signup. The field is listening.

the trick: their phone does the work

Here’s the thing I was scared of the first time: a room full of people all streaming to my laptop, and my framerate falls off a cliff mid-set. So I built it so that can’t happen.

Every audience phone runs its own pose tracking locally — MediaPipe, on their device, not mine. The phone watches its owner move and ships a handful of tiny numbers. My laptop just stamps a little per-phone record when a message shows up and moves on. None of it touches the render loop.

The whole crowd collapses into 8 scalars:

crowd.x  crowd.y  crowd.energy  crowd.spread
crowd.rise  crowd.sway  crowd.count  crowd.confidence

Those wire straight into whatever visualizer is up — the same way my own body drives it. When forty people lean left, crowd.sway leans with them. I can also draw every participant’s skeleton onto the projection, so the crowd sees itself inside the piece. There are votes and (sandboxed) parameter nudges too, if I feel like handing over a knob.

The headline: a full room can’t drop my framerate. The phones do the machine learning; I just read numbers.

I still have the wheel

Audience input is sandboxed and rate-limited — nobody’s getting a raw pointer to my patch. Every crowd channel is overridable, and when nobody’s connected they all read zero. So a solo set behaves exactly like a solo set. Entanglement only exists while someone’s holding the other end.

no WebRTC, no server to babysit

Transport is boring on purpose: plain WebSockets to a Cloudflare Worker with a Durable Object I call the “star relay.” Not WebRTC — I did not want to negotiate peer connections with a hundred strangers’ phones. Idle rooms cost nothing, the front-end stays static assets, and it’s hardened where it counts: origin allowlist, size caps, rate limits, and a per-room host key so a phone that just scanned the QR can only ever join as audience — never claim to be me.

It’s not a stadium gimmick. It’s an intimate thing — a shared field in a small room, everyone’s motion folded into the same visual. The field is listening.

→ qualia — the instrument this lives in → qualia overview — start here if you’re new → pose particles — the pose tracking each phone runs → the tether phone remote — same wire, one phone, full control instead of a crowd