The audience is the stage.

The Dashboard is the operator's console. From the booth it sends cues over the venue's own Wi-Fi to the free Augmented Theatre app running on the audience's phones: lines of text, and the images, video and sound a production needs. There is no setup on the phones and no pairing — a device that hears a cue obeys it.

File ▸ New Show… asks where your shows live, then makes one. A show is an ordinary folder: a document with the show's name, and a media folder holding everything sent to the audience for it. File ▸ Open Show… reopens one, and Reveal Show in Finder puts it in front of you. Clearing a production once its run has ended is deleting that folder.

Type in the large field and press Return to put that line on every phone in the house. The slider under it sets the size the text is drawn at. Pulse the text size makes the line breathe rather than sit still — press it again to stop.

Send Files… stages images, video or audio for the show that is open. Only file types the phones can present are offered. Files are copied into the show's media folder and announced to the house, and the phones fetch them quietly in the background — during walk-in, ideally, so that a cue at curtain is instant. A phone never fetches a file it already holds.

An AR set is a piece of scenery the audience raises in their phones over something real. The phone recognises an anchor — a printed drawing in their hands, an object, the stage itself — and the set stands on it, with video playing on its surfaces. Drop the AR set's folder onto the delivery table to import it — the Dashboard checks it, delivers it to the house like any other file, and the set appears as one row. Start raises it on the phones; Stop strikes it.

A look driven by the room itself: a GLSL fragment shader that colours every phone's screen from whatever its own microphone is hearing, live — no two performances light it quite the same way. The waveform chip opens a picker for a single .frag file; before it ever reaches a phone, the Dashboard compiles it against the same GLES rules a phone's own graphics driver enforces, and a shader that would fail there is refused at the door, with the compiler's own error shown inline rather than a guess at what's wrong. What the shader can use is read from its own uniform declarations, not typed in by the operator: one that asks for the room's sound level gets it; one that also asks for the live camera image gets that too, composited underneath. Start sends it to the house; each phone drives it from its own microphone rather than anything broadcast over the network, which is why the look never quite repeats. Stop ends it and hands the microphone back.

Four things are fed in, and nothing else: uTime, the elapsed seconds; uLevel, that phone's own sound, nought to one; uResolution, the viewport in pixels; and uCamera, the live image, for a shader that asks for it. Because uResolution is there under that name, a shader written for Shadertoy usually ports by renaming a few uniforms rather than by being rewritten — iTime, iResolution and iChannel0 map straight across, and what's left is to write the main() Shadertoy was writing for you.

One ships with the app. The demo show staged on first launch now includes Rainbow Spinning Circle — a conic-gradient disc that turns, breathes and sits in three layers of neon glow, with the room's own sound driving its colour wheel, opening its breathing and lifting its glow. It is the one item in the demo that looks different in a full hall than an empty one, and it is there to be taken apart: it was ported from an Isadora GLSL Shader patch, and the two things that had to change on the way in — the dialect, and a parameter that had to become uLevel because there was nothing else to drive it from — are the two things every port runs into.

The checks a compiler can't make are made too, because each of them ends the same way — a wall of black screens and nobody in the booth knowing why. A uniform nothing can feed is refused by name, so uFrequency is caught at the desk rather than read as zero all night. So is the right name with the wrong type or declared as an array. A file with no main() — an empty one, a truncated download, a header somebody renamed — is refused as well: it passes every compiler, links on nothing. And a shader that never reads uLevel is sent, but with a word first, since it will look the same in a silent hall as in a full one, which is rarely what was meant.

Loaded counts the phones that hold the whole file. In flight counts those still fetching it, with how far they have got on average. A dot beside a name means the audience is looking at that file right now. Phones report as they download; one that arrived with the file already cached from an earlier session simply never reports, so this table is a floor, not a headcount.

Right-click a row in the delivery list — long-press on iPad — and Copy OSC Address puts that row’s cue on the clipboard exactly as it goes on the wire, as one line: the address, and the file’s name where the cue names a file. It is meant for wiring a patch in Isadora, or any other OSC sender, against this show. It copies the file’s name, which you could have typed yourself, and falls back to the digest only where two files in the show share a name. The share, the loop flag and the show are left out on purpose: those are whatever the Dashboard’s own controls read at the moment you copy, not part of the row.

Select a delivered file and use these to put it on the audience's screens. Play, Pause and Stop are for video and sound; Show and Hide are for stills. Stop returns to the start and leaves the screen as it was before. None of these touch the network beyond one small packet, so they are safe to fire mid-scene.

The slider beside the transport decides how much of the house a cue addresses. Every phone rolls for itself, so at 40% roughly two in five obey — not an exact count, and a different two in five each time you fire. At the top of the slider the cue is for everyone.

While video or sound is playing, the bar shows about how far in the audience is. The phones do not report their position, so this is the Dashboard's own clock, started when the cue went out. The ± figure is the spread across the house: one broadcast starts every phone at once, and what remains is the few hundred milliseconds of network and player start, widening very slowly as handset clocks drift apart.

Text and the show cues are free, always. Sending files, addressing part of the audience and the delivery table work for five days, and afterwards need the full version — a one-off purchase, available at any time from the application menu. A lapsed trial never interrupts a performance already running: the basic cues keep working.

The Mac and the phones must be on the same Wi-Fi. Cues are broadcast on UDP port 3000, phones report on 3001, and files are served over HTTP on port 8090 — all three changeable in the Dashboard's Settings ▸ Ports…. Only the cue port must also be changed on the phones (iOS Settings; on Android, tap the network line on the idle screen seven times — the same guard Android uses for its own developer options); the other two are announced to the house in the cues. Phones learn where the Mac is from the cue itself, so nothing else needs configuring — but a guest network that blocks broadcast between devices will stop cues reaching the house.

Six taps on the idle logo, inside a two-second window, opens a hidden menu of buttons that run the same code each cue above runs — a surtitle, a colour fill, a vibration, the torch, each of the six camera looks, entering and leaving the show — without a Dashboard anywhere on the network to send them for real. Every button is the actual handler, not a mock of it: a shader, a capture, a network call, whatever the real cue touches, this touches too. It ships in every build, alpha and TestFlight included, since that is exactly where it earns its keep — checking a build behaves before it reaches an audience, on a phone with nothing else to talk to. Close returns to the idle screen and re-arms the six-tap gesture for the next cue.

The broadcast port is changeable in the app's settings — useful for giving technicians a channel separate from the audience's.