Something, b.TWEEN, Wavetrend and Timelines

Creative consultants Something Labs teamed up with Wavetrend to transform the way delegates at a key industry event interacted with speakers and each other. In keeping with the event, b.TWEEN’s, interactive media theme, Something Labs used Wavetrend’s active RFID technology to create a live, interactive networking resource for 100 attendees at the event.

Something Labs worked with Wavetrend to develop ‘Timelines’ after winning a competitive pitch to create an interactive, “social scrapbook” for b.TWEEN. The brief for the pitch was developed in partnership with London’s ICA. The main objective of the forum was to help the delegates connect with collaborators, commissioners and investors.

“Timelines twisted the concept of networking and made it fit with our audience,” said Katz Kiely, CEO of b.TWEEN creators, Just-b. Productions. “The project used RFID technology to help the attendees truly come together and connect at b.tween. Its interactive capabilities encouraged the delegates to expand their social and business networks by identifying and matching their common interests and observations throughout the event.”

The Timelines project team turned Bradford’s National Museum of Photography, Film and Television into a living map for the b.TWEEN conference, using RFID tags in each personalised delegate badge to track the movements of attendees throughout the two-day event. Large display screens located in each of the venue’s five main ‘tracking zones’ showed live, automatic updates of each attendees whereabouts using colour coded paths. Directly linked to these readings were photos and profiles of the corresponding delegates, all of which were provided and approved by the b.TWEENattendees. This made it easy to for individuals to connect and meet specific individuals through the conference.

The second aspect of the project took these connections one step further by matching attendees based on their common interests in specific areas at the event itself. Attendees were instructed to click on their badges to ‘bookmark’ observations or soundbites that were interesting to them throughout the conference. For example, if they were attending a breakout session and the speaker said something of particular interest, an attendee could simply click his or her badge. This action would automatically provide a link to a record of where the attendee was at that place and time.

These bookmarks would appear as dots on the display screens and would alert delegates to other attendees who have bookmarked similar comments, encouraging them to network and discuss their common interests. Following the event, delegates were able to individually log in to their secure profiles to view their movements and listen to the specific audio soundbites linked to their bookmarks. This provided them with a visual and audio record of their movements and observations at b.tween.

To make all of this happen, the Timelines team, together with onsite staff, wired half a kilometre of cabling throughout the seven floors of the museum. They installed Wavetrend’s W-series active RFID hardware to create five main ‘tracking zones’, each enabled with Wavetrend RFID readers, at the event.

Collaboration on the project was critical, tying together platforms as diverse as RFID, Adobe Flash, and the web-based backend. “We worked with both sponsors and our developer network on this unique opportunity to create something both novel and exciting, designing our own RFID software and analysis toolkits, said David Mee of Something Labs. “We had worked with Wavetrend a few years back and had a good rapport with the company. Their equipment was cost effective and met our needs and the staff were helpful and friendly in identifying the best technology for the project.”

The Timelines project was a success. It gave the b.TWEEN delegates an intimate and personal experience and record of the event through its RFID technology. “For many of the delegates it was the first time they had been exposed to RFID and whilst one participant was found speaking into his tag, most of them got into the swing of clicking and bookmarking, creating a rich resource of recommendations and information,” said Kiely.

The data generated from the project not only provided the delegates with a wealth of resources to use onsite and refer to in the future, but it proved an invaluable resource to Just-b Productions, providing instant feedback on which speakers were the best attended and most popular as well as insight into the traffic patterns of attendees at the event.

“An initial worry was that delegates would object to being tracked and have their movements visible to all of the attendees at b.TWEENand therefore not participate in the project. When we explained the project at registration, however, everyone was happy to give their permission to be involved,” said Steve Cullen, Something Labs. “As b.TWEEN is a tight knit group of artists, attendees were happy to have a new way to connect with each other and record things they found particularly useful or interesting. Everyone got really excited and involved.”

Timelines allowed Something Labs to learn in-situ what RFID could do. It highlighted the positive applications of tracking people – helping them come together and connect and has earned a nomination for this year’s RFID excellence awards. For further information on Something Labs, please click here to visit their website