Elevating Interactivity

One of the advertising industry’s oldest and most prestigious events is the Cannes Lions, a trade show and awards show ending this weekend in the south of France. There’s always lots going on at Cannes, even this year when the economy is on the ropes, attendance is down, and the lavish partying for which Cannes is know has become unseemly. Since it’s such a big event, it’s still a great opportunity for agencies to showcase what’s next for the industry.

Without a doubt the most exciting vision was brought to Cannes by the LA agency Schematic, as part of their sponsorship of the show.  Ever technologically forward, they developed for the show a huge multitouch wall that visitors could use to explore the schedule and maps of the event, find other event attendees and build an instant social network, etc. The interface was very much like the futuristic depictions from Minority Report, further proof that the technology and computing visions from that film are becoming more viable every year.

One of the coolest features of the wall was that it could recognize people’s identities via an RFID chip embedded in their show badge. This enabled people to get personalized content and emails sent to them without having to enter any information. A lot of this information, such as walking directions to a particular restaurant were extremely useful, especially since almost everyone at a show like Cannes Lions has a Blackberry or iPhone or some other mobile email device.

This video, which is an interview and demo from John Barton, the lead architect on the project, probably gives the best sense of how the wall worked of any I’ve seen.

I also found some cool images posted by the team that show a little of the behind-the-scenes. This one shows some test imagery and you can see the basic desktop PCs that run it, where the cover is removed at the bottom. But more interesting, if you look closely you can see the 6 different projection images that are edge-blended together because color calibration is not completed.

While this sort of system is probably not going to be cost-effective for other companies to deploy at tradeshows in the near future, it’s an interface that certainly rivals the multitouch set piece that CNN got so much attention for in their election coverage.

Whether or not large format multitouch pervades day-to-day computing like Minority Report predicted, one thing that is for sure is that we are going to be seeing more and more of these large multitouch systems in public spaces and other locations (like TV studios) where the still considerable investment required makes sense in an ROI analysis.