We take reaching across zoom boxes one step further with a digital bridge constructed of quick, free technology: Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS Studio) and Zoom.

[INSERT VIDOES]

Methodological source

Let’s make a dance thing together! Perhaps we could copy a linear scene from a music video and make it a fan. Follow the original path and a million branches. What if one of us is grounded—a copy of the original—and the other branches out into a million copies forming the fan?

What if there were a digital bridge that could let us coexist in the same space without time-consuming or high-tech editing?

…Long pause…

I wonder if there is a way we could see both of our images overlaid live?

I can do that!

…8 minute technical intermission…

We begin!

Technical details

We use Zoom and Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS). Both were free as of the time we started this exploration (Jun 15, 2021) and we did not need a paid Zoom account.

OBS is live video editing software that I have found quite useful in live digital art. The level of liveness it offers is outstanding. I’ve gone so far as to edit a live video of myself sourced from both my built-in camera and a screen capture of my screen (the very screen that I used to perform editing) for a remote live performance. It is fairly simple and quick to set up and learn the basics.

The flow of information was as follows: Halvor’s webcam was captured and transmitted to me via Zoom. This was displayed to me on my screen via Zoom. OBS took a screen capture of that live feed of Halvor, accessed my built-in webcam, overlaid the two with a “green screen” filter with opacity set to 50% (this is a simple averaging of the two video feeds but I couldn’t find a feature just for that so I used a “green screen” with sensitivity turned all the way down), and returned that to my operating system as a virtual camera feed. In Zoom, I selected that virtual camera as my camera (as opposed to my computer’s built-in webcam), and Zoom both recorded that feed and returned it back to Halvor. The total latency in the system was low and dominated by the latency of internet communication facilitated by Zoom. I didn’t notice any latency, and Halvor noticed a bit of a delay between their real self and the returned video overly (one round trip). Resource consumption on my MacBook Air was substantive, but well within its capabilities.

This system can be set up fairly quickly the first time once a host is familiar with OBS, and very quickly once OBS is preconfigured with the overlay settings. This system should generalize well to overlays of more than two people.