Where Northstar runs — and what it runs there.
The hardware is the same in every venue. The cue lists are different. Below is what each market typically looks like — channel counts, package sizing, the day-to-day workflow.
Haunted Attractions
Scare triggers, prop activation, lighting, ambient audio across dozens of rooms — fired on schedule, on cue, or on actor input.
A walk-through haunt is a distributed timing problem. You need a strobe to fire the instant a guest crosses a beam in Room 7, a pneumatic to drop a panel in Room 12 four seconds later, and a soundbed to keep playing in Room 4 the whole time — and you need it to do that 80 times a night without a tech standing over it. Northstar runs the whole choreography from one Helm, with Polaris nodes scattered through every room and Bridge sitting at the booth.
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Beam-triggered scares synchronized to lighting and sound across multiple rooms.
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Actor-cued effects fired from wireless triggers or panic buttons.
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Scheduled fog and ambient audio that runs unattended between groups.
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Show start / stop / reset handled in seconds from the box office.
Escape Rooms
Puzzle-triggered effects, game-flow sequences, multi-room coordination — locks, magnets, reveal mechanisms, hint audio.
Escape rooms live on tight cause-and-effect: solve the puzzle, hear the click, find the next clue. Northstar's GPIO nodes drive every maglock, drop panel, and reveal mechanism in the room; audio nodes handle hint playback and atmosphere; the operator can fire any cue manually from Cuemaster on the booth touchscreen. When a group buys out, the operator hits Show Reset on Bridge and the room is back to ready in under ten seconds.
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Puzzle solve → unlock cascades, with conditional gating on prior solves.
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Hint audio fired from the gamemaster booth without leaving the camera feed.
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Per-room atmospheric scoring that fades, swells, or stops on cue.
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Show Reset that re-locks every door and re-arms every puzzle in one button press.
Museums & Exhibits
Scheduled playback, interactive triggers, timed exhibit sequences — runs unattended for hours.
Museums need show control that runs from 9 AM to 5 PM without a single human in the loop. Northstar handles scheduled exhibit cycles, visitor-triggered playback, and timed light-and-sound sequences with the same hardware that runs a haunted attraction — and it does it with a quieter operator UI tuned for facilities staff, not show operators. Video signage runs on Polaris V; interactive plinths run on Polaris G; ambient soundscapes run on Polaris A.
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Scheduled gallery cycles — lights up, soundscape in, video plays, repeat.
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Beam- or button-triggered exhibit moments for interactive installations.
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Per-day or per-event schedule overrides for after-hours programming.
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Health monitoring on the Cuemaster touchscreen at the gallery's tech station.
Immersive Theater
Multi-zone show control for walk-through and site-specific performances — millisecond cueing across buildings.
Site-specific and immersive theater asks show control to do what a stage manager and a sound op and a lighting board used to do — but spread across a warehouse, an abandoned hotel, or a city block. Northstar's network is built for this: TrueNorth covers the venue with one SSID, Helm fires cues that hit nodes within milliseconds of each other, and the production's stage manager runs the entire show from the Cuemaster touchscreen at the booth with Bridge as the master kill switch.
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Synchronized cue fire across multiple rooms or buildings.
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Per-scene zone activation that follows the audience through the venue.
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Manual cue fire from Cuemaster for stage-managed runs.
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Pre-show, intermission, and post-show schedules that handle house management.
Building something we haven't listed?
Dark rides, walkthrough experiences, planetariums, theme park midways, location-based VR. If it has cues and triggers, Northstar can probably drive it.