Large Synced AR Experience

Hello, All you amazing geniuses.
i am the Developer of an Augmented reality app that is used for a large scale event that happens once a year. the app uses Vuforia and integrates with merchandise from the show and other things like that. but as well as easy things such as that the app also places content on the stage and at different places around the arena during different songs.
now here's my problem.
last year we had about 300 people use the app during the show (at the same time) and each device every 5 seconds had to check values on a PHP script (on a website), and this value is set by a show caller. now obviously this is really inefficient and results in a lot of unneeded calls to this singular script. I'm wondering if anyone would have any better ideas on how to get this information.
add all the users to a multiplayer game?.
push information to the user's device? (I'm not sure this would be quick enough I believe there's a large delay from when you send the message to it arriving).

also, we expect a thousand+ users to be using the app during the show this year and we don't think a website would be able to take that load in such a short time. (upwards of 12000 calls every minute)

anyway, thanks for any help. really appreciated!!!
(i use Csharp)

 

This is really more of a network infrastructure question than a Unity scripting question. At least you are aware of the possible routes and the problems you might face. I'm not sure how the push notes perform in real time vs periodic polling, so you'd really have to do some experimenting, and it is difficult to do at the scale you propose.

Keep in mind you're in good company: every game company that publishes a AAA online game screws up the launch day. The only time you can reliably connect to servers on a brand-new online game is if the game simply failed to market itself and almost nobody is playing it.

 

Happy to Chuck this in network infrastructure if I need to but the problem is that it is marketed well the app will be downloaded at least 300 times purely because of the number of people who attend the event (14000+).
although I'm not sure if it is a network infrastructure problem... because everything has to be done live. the app has to change scenes in under 5 seconds. any more than that and I doubt the directors will like it very much

 

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