Tech

Guests could charge their smartphones in the lounge and munch on white- and yellow-colored snacks. The centerpieces during the education sessions were framed instructions on how to reference the summit on social media and log on to the hotel's Wi-Fi network.

The DJ booth was designed to resemble the military recruitment office in Times Square. A sign gave guests pointers on how to promote the event on social media, including holding up provided signs with messages such as "I am fighting poverty like a New Yorker."

An interactive Winners Gallery, which allowed attendees to view 400 works from 10 different mediums, included a touch-screen format that allowed guests to browse and watch the winning commercials.

Guests received an R.F.I.D. bracelet at check-in that they could scan to send messages from the event to their Facebook pages.  Photographers at the after-party took photos that guests could scan with their bracelets to upload to Facebook.

Machines don't have to be mobile to be intelligent, as is the case with the TweetingSeat, a product U.K.-based designer Chris McNicholl created. The interactive park bench is activated when someone takes a seat, uploading images from two cameras to a live Twitter feed. Imagine interactive furniture that automatically snaps shots of guests and creates content for social media platforms.

Touch screens have made computers with keyboards and mice look clunky. And now there's a company making touch screen monitors seem out-of-date. Displair is a device that uses "touchable" air, that is, a thin stream of air infused with microscopic water particles, to display images. What's more, users can interact with the air, navigating the screen with their fingers. It's essentially a touch screen without the screen, which, if used at events, potentially could eliminate the need for bulky computer stations.

Projection mapping—also known as 3-D mapping—has become a wildly popular tool for event marketers, and a Microsoft Research project extends the use of that technology even further. Designed as a form of immersive entertainment, a prototype dubbed IllumiRoom captures the forms and layout of a room via a Kinect for Windows camera and, with a projector, expands the visuals beyond the screen in real time. The system can even make it look like a room is moving.

Attendees could eat their words, literally, at an installation from Glasgow Studio that turned their tweets into dried pasta. A wheel of alphabet pasta would spell out the words of tweets from attendees who used the hashtag #EatThat. Clear bags holding the pasta also had stickers printed with the original tweet.