If you come from the world of show lighting you might be familiar with the concept of a lighting desk with an “A” and a “B” section which lets you get the next lighting cue ready and then fade or swap to it. Why have we never thought about this style of control for everything else?

I’ve travelled around lots of schools and small AV companies with these kinds of desks, so the concept is very familiar to me. I’ve also worked many shows which have essentially boiled down to a short series of states of lighting, microphone muting, and which PC is giving the presentation. This was just a quick proof of concept, but would allow exactly that; pre set the presentation source, the lighting state, and microphone mutes and press go when you’re ready for that state.

I see no reason this concept couldn’t be expanded to control pretty much any device, and have as many preset states as desired. You could just have a series of GO buttons and a single set of selection controls and a save button, allowing you to save any combination to any number of GO buttons.