Show control at City of Good Forum & State of Play 2026
Forty-five custom button boxes, one tap each to fire a lighting and AV scene over Wi-Fi — the show control behind NVPC's City of Good Forum and State of Play 2026.
By FrontHAUS Team · Editorial
On 31 March we handled the technology behind NVPC's City of Good Forum and State of Play 2026 — an event graced by Minister of State Dinesh Vasu Dash, who holds office across the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth and the Ministry of Manpower.
The part we're showing here is the bit guests never see but always feel: the show control. The exhibition hall was lined with illuminated display pillars, one per charity and community organisation, and we wanted the room to respond on cue — lighting and AV scenes changing without a technician hunched over a laptop firing them by hand.
So we built our own custom button boxes. Each one is a simple, sturdy panel of physical buttons, and a press fires a scene through Bitfocus Companion over Wi-Fi. Every box is battery-powered too, so there are no cables at all — no power runs, no data runs snaking across a busy floor, just a tap. We deployed 45 buttons across the event, which let the team trigger exactly the right look at exactly the right moment from wherever they happened to be standing.
Why build the hardware ourselves rather than buy a generic controller? Because a real event floor is unforgiving. The buttons need to be obvious under pressure, reliable over a venue network that's carrying everyone's phones too, and laid out for the specific show — not a one-size-fits-all grid. Doing it in-house means we can shape the boxes around how the run-of-show actually works, and fix or change anything on the day.
It's not the flashiest thing we make, but it's a good example of how we think: the experience an audience remembers is usually held up by a lot of quiet, dependable engineering they'll never notice. Getting that part right is most of the job.