As the sun went down in Cannes, France, June 17, Twitter fired up a 40,000-lumens Barco projector mounted on a roof 150 feet across a street from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. The venue was the site of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a weeklong award program to recognize creative excellence in advertising and communications. For the next several hours, a 3-D projection of tweets using the official event hashtag, #CannesLions, appeared on a 35- by 65-foot billboard located 30 feet above the venue’s entrance. The digital activation, created by Incredible Machines, ran for five hours that night and for the next three nights, while during the day the billboard showed a static image of the hashtag printed on canvas. The top tweets with the hashtag were projected onto the billboard at night, and the display also included live tweets from specific users that were selected by Twitter. The projection was a success, garnering substantial interest from the festival’s 12,000 attendees and contributing to more than 91,000 tweets using #CannesLions. That’s a 51 percent increase compared to 2012 and translated to a total reach of 542 million people, according to Buzz Radar. To generate excitement the first night, Twitter hosted a gathering in a penthouse across the street from the billboard right before the projector turned on.
Wine tastings typically stick to a format that involves stations, swirling, and sipping, but a recent event in Toronto broke free of any staid formulas. Underscoring its company name, Open Wine hosted an event at 2nd Floor in April that had a “Be Open” theme, and guests were encouraged to open themselves up to more than just new types of vino. Plenty of the host company's product was on hand, but tasting the wine was just a jumping-off point for a night that included ping-pong tournaments, liquid-nitrogen doughnuts, temporary tattoos, and lots of tweeting. Guests placed R.F.I.D.-enabled wine glasses down on the so-called “Bird Box,” which was created for the event and pre-programmed with action tweets, which encouraged guests to participate in various activations at the event. The tweets from @Open_Wines included: "Hey @[user], Damn, you look great. Find our photog @textstyles + pose for a photo so we can remember this FOREVER. #BeOPENparty."
At London Fashion Week in September, Topshop tested a new app that allowed it to transmit photos, Web links, and other content to mobile devices using sound. The mobile app Chirp, available as a free download, shares data via a 1.8-second series of notes that sound similar to birdsong. The “chirps” played on speakers at the show in Regent’s Park and also in Topshop’s Oxford Circus store, where the retailer created what it called a “digital garden” with monitors suspended from trees like birdhouses. Folks within earshot of the speakers who had the app open on their phones instantly received the content, which included runway images, photos of the clothes being made, backstage activities, and hair and makeup preparations. Recipients could tap on the images to receive additional information, and they could also share the images via Twitter, Facebook, and email.
To get a treat from a Polaroid vending machine at Ocean Drive's Sun Covered pool party as part of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Swim in Miami, guests had to tweet a code that would activate the machine.
The Makr Shakr is a bartender, social sharing system, and alcohol consumption monitor in one robotic design. Designed by the M.I.T. Senseable City Lab in collaboration with the Coca-Cola Company and Bacardi Rums and produced by Italian firm Carlo Ratti Associati, the robot debuted at the Google I/O conference in May. Guests transmit their cocktail orders via the Makr Shakr app, then watch as three large, orange robotic arms mix up the prescribed combination of liquor, syrups, fruit mixers, and ice. The movements are precise enough to muddle a mojito and thinly slice a lemon. A large screen behind the bar displays a variety of stats, such as number of drinks in the queue, approximate wait time, drinks ready for pickup, and most popular spirits by gender. The app also allows users to see what type of drinks others are ordering, rate the drinks, and share photos on social networks. It also aims to promote responsible consumption by monitoring what a person orders and how often. The developers say for now Makr Shakr is a prototype, intended to be a “social experiment that looks at how people might embrace the new possibilities offered by digital manufacturing.”
Creative Technologies and Production Club created a variety of animations in the world's largest inflatable dome for the sixth event in the traveling electronic dance music-focused Dot Party series—created by Minecraft mogul Markus Persson—which took place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in June. The 69-foot-tall, 200-foot-diameter dome held 2,500 people who partied to DJ Snake and Skrillex and was lit up by a 360-degree mapped projection that featured constantly changing animations.
