What is Hippotizer?

Hippotizer is a real-time media server designed for the live events industry.

Lowlands festival 2016 – Bravo Stage
Hippos Supplied and Operated by: tenfeet
Photos: Bart Heemskerk, De fotomeisjes

Born from visual jockey software first developed 15 years ago, Hippotizer uniquely combines ease of use and flexibility with the industries’ most powerful 3D mapping engine; SHAPE.

Known as a real-time media server, Hippotizer reacts to changes from many different control sources instantly from DMX to Zookeeper. Built for stability and flexibility, Hippotizer is used to drive video on some of the largest live events worldwide.

Hippotizer is comprised of dedicated media server hardware running the Hippotizer V4 software.

The Hippotizer software is made of three applications: the Engine, Zookeeper and SHAPE.

• The Engine renders video. It runs on every Hippotizer machine and communicates over the network.

• Zookeeper is a remote management program creating an interface to Engine(s) on the network.

• SHAPE is a projection mapping tool-set that sits inside the Engine as a plugin. SHAPE has a separate network based management application.

Hippotizer separates 2D and 3D workflows for the simple reason that content is 2D. Media Management, playback and manipulation is handled within the Hippotizer and Zookeeper applications. Increasingly however, content is being mapped onto 3D objects through projection mapping, this is where SHAPE comes in. SHAPE is the 3rd dimension of Hippotizer V4. 3D in Hippotizer is made up of two pieces: a plugin within the Engine and a management application called SHAPE.

SHAPE enables the user to import a model and apply video from a Hippotizer V4 machine to the model. SHAPE allows you to edit model meshes, UV map and is able to assist with aligning, blending, masking and warping the projector(s).

SHAPE communicates via the network to the Engine running on Hippotizer hardware allowing real time manipulation. Once the model is configured, all settings are saved to the Hippotizer which then handles all content play back; the SHAPE application is then no longer required.

SHAPE’s manual can be found here: SHAPE Manual