Hiru Star
DESKTOPHiru Star is one of Sri Lanka's most popular reality singing competitions, broadcast live on Hiru TV across multiple seasons. Viewers vote in real time through a mobile app to decide which contestants advance, and the results are displayed live on broadcast TV. I was responsible for designing and building the entire suite of Unity desktop applications that powered the on-screen voting experience — systems that had to perform flawlessly under thousands of simultaneous votes per second, in front of a national television audience with zero tolerance for failure.
The Applications
Three separate Unity desktop applications were built, each serving a distinct role in the live broadcast pipeline.
LED Wall Voter Display
Connected to the backend via a persistent Socket.IO connection, this application receives voter IDs in real time as votes are cast and displays the profile images of voters in a live-updating grid on a large LED wall on stage. As thousands of votes flood in during peak moments, images populate the grid with smooth animations and transitions, creating a visually engaging live moment that puts the voting audience directly on stage alongside the performers.
Vote Percentage Bar
A real-time animated bar that visualises the live vote split between competing singers. As votes are counted and tallied by the backend, the bar updates continuously with fluid transitions, giving the television audience an instant read on who is leading. Animations and visual effects were carefully tuned to feel dramatic and broadcast-worthy without compromising performance.
Judge Vote Application
A dedicated interface used by the show's judges to cast their own votes live on stage. Built for simplicity and reliability, this application needed to be foolproof under the pressure of a live television environment.
Architecture
All three applications run simultaneously and are synchronised using a local master/client server architecture. One machine acts as the master, coordinating state and timing across the client applications to ensure every screen updates in lockstep — critical for a live broadcast where visual consistency across multiple output channels is non-negotiable. The final output from all applications is delivered through Blackmagic DeckLink capture cards, feeding directly into the broadcast production chain for live Hiru TV transmission.
Performance & Optimisation
With thousands of votes arriving per second at peak moments, performance was the central engineering challenge. Every component — the Socket.IO message handler, the image loading and caching pipeline, the grid layout system, the animation engine — was profiled and optimised to maintain a consistent broadcast-quality frame rate. Dropped frames or stutters on a live national broadcast are not an option.
- Real-time Socket.IO integration for live vote ingestion
- High-throughput voter image grid with dynamic population and animation for LED wall display
- Animated real-time vote percentage bar with broadcast-quality transitions
- Master / client local server architecture for multi-application synchronisation
- Blackmagic DeckLink card integration for live Hiru TV broadcast output
- Custom animations, transitions and visual effects for all three applications
- Performance-optimised rendering pipeline for high-volume real-time data
- Deployed across multiple seasons of Hiru TV's national broadcast
