interesting December v2
It’s time for the final That’s Interesting of the year! Below we share some fantastic event inspiration to help keep things fresh in the coming weeks. In other news – we’re proud as punch to have been named Challenger Event Agency of the Year at the EVCOM Awards!
Most Interesting:
Interesting Breakfast – The Write Up (10min explore)
We recently hosted one of our Interesting Breakfasts. As well as great experiential content the team gave speed presentations. Check out the varied examples shared in talks on Immersive Experiences, Brain-Friendly Content, The Power of PPT, Stage Design Trends and Intelligent Networking.
Just Plain Interesting:
Adobe’s Incredible ‘Physical’ Event Identity (2min explore)
Every year Adobe work with an artist to create their Summit identity. In 2018 the identity became an experience in it’s own right. A beautiful structure and a clever brand story.
Square’s Registration Wall – A Steal Worthy Idea (1min read)
We love it when people find ways to re-imagine often overlooked parts of events. Scroll through the article to see how Square injected creativity into registration.
Augmented Reality Without Glasses or Screens (2min explore)
Billed as ‘coming soon’ the Hololamp promises to be a wonderful new way for event audiences to engage with content. Don’t be put off by the dodgy restaurant food, Hololamp opens up really exciting creative opportunities.
Beautiful TED Experience (3min explore)
This isn’t new but gosh it’s pleasing on the eye. Wonderful physical typography and who doesn’t like an illusion chandelier?
Interesting Venues:
Magazine – opening Summer 2019
Edwardian Leicester Square – opening 2020
And Something for Christmas:
If there’s something interesting you think we should include, please share it via thatsinteresting@liveunion.co.uk
Intelligent Networking Ideas for Events
The second of our Interesting Breakfast topics was Intelligent Networking. Harriette shared a great mix of format and technology ideas, all designed to help your audience make more valuable connections.
Professional Introducer
Galvanize the networking at your event by bringing in someone who’s job it is to start better conversations.
Networking Lounge
Braindate is a networking solution that combines physical design and facilitated connections to create stronger communities at events.
Sweatworking
A trend that sees events moving away from the traditional drinks reception, instead inviting attendees to join an exercise class. It’s proven that working out in a group creates a ‘tribe mentality’, encouraging trust and developing long lasting relationships.
Mixalot
Soon to be released, this a speed networking scavenger hunt. Attendees are paired using an algorithm and sent a text message with a location and name. Once in pairs they have a 10minute speed network. When the time’s up everyone is given a new location and person to meet.
Socio
This app’s ‘Shake to Connect’ feature gives attendees a chance to find out who is around them and exchange contact details.
Social Wearables
Limbic Media’s ‘Capture the Rainbow’ game uses wearables to encourage networking. Delegates wear a coloured LED disc. The aim of the game is to get as many colours on your disc as possible. To do this attendees must start conversations and tap discs.
Brain Friendly Engagement for Events - Interesting Breakfast Talks
Thanks so much to everyone who came along to Thursday's Interesting Breakfast. As promised, we'll be putting all the content up here. If you'd like more detail on anything you heard or experienced just drop us a line.
Jez kicked things off, sharing five ways that presenters can make their content more brain-friendly. These examples can be used to inspire senior leaders to find new ways to deliver content.
Earn Attention
Establish the relevance of the topic with an anecdote or startling statistic. Jamie Oliver used a statistic in a powerful way to grab the audience at the start of his TED Talk on Obesity.
Change the Pace & Dynamic
This can be as simple as breaking up a presentation with a special guest. Intel's CEO did something far more ambitious: a colleague joined him on stage, took a 3D scan of his body which was turned into an avatar and placed into a computer game.
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Power of Live Events
Finding creative ways to harness the immediacy of being face-to-face with an audience can be incredibly engaging. For a recent client presentation on demographics we inserted a worldometer API that shared live population data.
S.T.A.R (Something They'll Always Remember)
Identify the S.T.A.R moment in the presentation and then find creative ways to land it. Al Gore famously used a scissor lift to dramatise the rise in CO2 emissions - following the line off the chart.
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Participation in Live Events
The previous ideas are all great ways to engage audiences with big ideas, but business events also typically need to land more granular content. Presentations aren't the best way to do this. Jez included two examples of formats that are less about speakers delivering content and more about audiences discovering meaning for themselves.
The first is a Traffic Light Session which sees the audience discussing ideas and indicating their response to it using voting paddles. The second is a Solution Room - a great way to harness the collective intelligence in the room and find practical solutions to people's challenges.
Set Design Trends for Events - Interesting Breakfast
Conor took the helm for the third of our Interesting Breakfast talks, sharing four trends in set design.
Raw Materials
Sweeping corporate backdrops are out, replaced by a vogue for more left-field materials. As businesses choose varied and creative venues we're seeing sets that echo the building's design. Like this nice scaffolding example we came across created for Google.
Agility
As events become more multi-dimensional, with the focus shifting from plenary sessions, so sets need to facilitate this. Below is an example of an event where the networking and plenary spaces have merged giving people a choice of how they engage with presentations.
360 Designs for Events
The desire for more intimate settings often leads to 360 solutions. This can of course be a challenge for presenters. The below trefoil set, designed by Live Union, kept the audience close without the need for presenting in the round.
Screen Solutions
As innovative screens become more accessible, so an increasing number of events are replacing physical sets with interesting screen formats. Relying on fantastic screen content to engage their audience. The below screen design which we found with its beveled edges is a simple clean example.
In Praise of Powerpoint - Interesting Breakfast
Paul used his Interesting Breakfast slot to extol the virtues of PowerPoint. If you think PowerPoint has had its day - think again.
Animations for PPT
Paul started by sharing some of the exciting features found in the latest version of PowerPoint. Features such as Morph Transitions bring a level of movement and transition that was previously the preserve of professional animators.
Using Widescreen in Presentations
People imagine that wide-screen content has to be created in a different programme - Paul showed that in fact PowerPoint is perfect for non-traditional screen formats.
Having stepped through the process for creating wide-screen content using PowerPoint, Paul shared five benefits of going wide:
- Gets the audience closer to the action by opening up more landscape room layouts
- Encourages brain-friendly content with large powerful graphics
- Communicates a modern, tech savvy business
- Provides a more immersive experience
- Allows space for multiple feeds within a single 'canvas' - graphics / live camera / live data
As more venues install wide screens, the ability to create affordable, visually stunning, graphics will become vital, and PowerPoint provides the ideal solution.
Interesting October
Welcome to the latest ‘That’s Interesting’ featuring the event-worthy discoveries that have been circulating the Live Union offices during October. On 22nd November we’ll be hosting one of our Interesting Breakfasts at the Soho Hotel. If you enjoy this newsletter then you’ll love it! Tickets are available here.
Most Interesting:
Chanel’s Stunning Set Design (Quick watch)
Hat’s off to everyone involved in this gorgeous production. Nice threads too.
Just Plain Interesting:
Very cool Tape Art (2min explore)
A whole new world of graphic display. Perfect for your networking space, office or exhibition stand.
Screens Re-imagined (5min explore)
A Live Union report exploring incredible new ways to bring stories to life at events.
Huge Illuminated Flowers (2min explore)
We’ve just ordered a bunch of these epic blooms for an upcoming event.
Bill Gates Releases Mosquitoes into TED audience (2min watch)
The power of a simple prop or stunt to make sure audiences remember your point.
Projection Helmets (1min explore)
Who wouldn’t want to don one of National Geographic’s immersive space helmets?
The KidCat Team (1min explore)
The place to go for feline performers who project a live feed of what they’re looking at through their LED eyes!
Some things to go to:
Videogames – Design / Play / Disrupt at V&A
Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro
Skyline Skating at John Lewis
If there’s something interesting you think we should include, please share it via thatsinteresting@liveunion.co.uk
Screens Re-Imagined
Iceberg melts. Water floods arena. Audience engulfed in water. Bono avatar looms large over audience.
This mind-bending Augmented Reality spectacle awaits anyone with tickets to U2’s Experience + Innocence tour this Autumn.
These creative storytelling techniques are not the preserve of the stadium rock elite. New ways of delivering screen content are changing how we tell stories and communicate ideas within business events.
Why now is the right time to reassess how screens are being used at your events
Audiences
Our everyday relationship with screens has entirely changed. We engage with content across multiple screens, of widely different dimensions, often simultaneously. Where once we simply watched, now we touch and swipe.
So, when it comes to events, audiences have higher expectations for visual content and want to engage with screens in new ways.
Content
As businesses produce more multi-dimensional digital content, such as mixed reality product demonstrations or interactive sales presentations, live experiences are having to find new ways to use screens. At the same time, presenters are increasingly aware of the new possibilities that screens provide to tell their story.
Technology
Underpinning everything are rapid changes in technology, making new ways of using screens possible and dramatically bringing down costs. High resolution LED screens can be built to almost any shape, size or location and software innovations are making dynamic content available to a wider range of events.
Three ways to re-imagine your screens
1. Super-wide screens and beyond
The confines of the 16:9 format are long gone. Super-wide LED screens allow us to envelop audiences and change how we design content. Simply put, the screen is a canvass on which you can seamlessly arrange any combination of media: presentation graphics / audience response data / live camera / streams from beyond the event.
Whilst the default is often super-wide, it can be incredibly powerful to combine multiple screens and introduce other formats. The same content can run across multiple screens or be segmented to specific ones. This approach can be as engaging for an audience of 100 or 10,000 and can easily integrate PowerPoint or Keynote content.
The Power of Dynamic Graphics
Many visually stunning wide-screen events incorporate PowerPoint or Keynote content. But greater creative opportunities are to be found by using real-time graphics packages such as Ventuz. These allow you to create presentation content more akin to the graphics we’re familiar with on election night broadcasts or Sky Sports’ analysis.
Animated 3D graphics
TV quality visual effects
Live data
Feed live content into a presentation
Real-time rendering
Ability to change content at any point
Non-linear content
Presentations that can follow multiple paths
2. Projection mapping
Initially, the preserve of the civic arts spectacle or movie launch, projection mapping has proven to be a powerful way to engage business audiences.
Projection mapping allows you to place content onto any surface, extending your content beyond a projection screen or doing away entirely with a screen and bringing a whole space to life.
The creative possibilities to transform a venue and transport your audience to a new place are immense. Projection mapping onto 3D stage sets is also a powerful way to deliver presentation content, different surfaces used for specific messages, to highlight stats or display video.
3. Augmented reality
Most people have some experience of AR, whether it’s arranging furniture using Ikea’s Place app or playing Pokemon Go. As with these examples, AR within event presentations melds the real world and computer-generated imagery.
The onstage presenter can be placed into a different composite world when viewed on screen. This opens up fascinating opportunities. If, for example, you have a large product that can’t physically be present at the event, the presenter can interact with it live on screen.
If you’d like to explore exciting new ways of using screens to engage your audience then do get in touch.
Coming next …
Screens Re-imagined – part 2 – Beyond the main-stage: new ways to use screens to create powerful personalised experiences
Interesting September
Welcome to September’s That’s Interesting. Our shortlist of the most useful and inspiring things we’ve come across this month in the world of events.
If you enjoy it, then please do share!
Most Interesting:
Great Augmented Reality Presentation - 5min watch
Brilliant example of innovating main stage content. For more of this kind of thing request a copy of our next thinkpiece 'Re-imagining Screens'!
Plain Interesting:
Inspiration from Ebay's Seller Conference - 3min read
Hyper-targeted networking, events within events, pop-up stages...
Real World Data Viz - 1min explore
Wonderfully creative ways to bring data to life in the real world. Perfect for networking areas.
Domino Artist - 5min watch
Surely we can find a reason to include a domino artist at an event!
Typographical Seating - 1min explore
Seating and signage become one with these alphabet chairs at the London Design Festival. Not to be out done how about the world's largest bean bag at London Fashion Week?
Gorgeous Modular Touch Sensitive Lighting - 2min explore
Lovely interactive event design idea with possibilities for audience collaboration (or just buy one for home)
Burning Man - Report From The Front Line Of The Experience Economy - 3min read
How long until your event features Ken & Barbie cosplay or a 'break your caterpillar cage' yoga session?
Venue to know about:
Circus West
New event spaces coming on-line at Battersea Power Station
Things to go to:
Flo and Joan: Alive On Stage
Darkly witty musical comedy duo, live at Soho Theatre
Esquire Townhouse
Britain's most stylish pop-up members club hosts a 4 day extravaganza of fun, food and fashion! With talks from the likes of Christian Louboutin, a live performance from Tom Odell and even a Martini making masterclass!
If there’s something interesting you think we should include, please share it via thatsinteresting@liveunion.co.uk
Interesting August
Welcome to August’s That’s Interesting. Our shortlist of the most useful and inspiring things we’ve come across this month in the world of events.
If you enjoy it, then please do share.
Most Interesting:
Wise words on building event narratives - 30min listen
Insightful Gather Geeks podcast offers jargon free practical advice on mapping your event's story
Plain Interesting:
U2's amazing transparent LED screen - 3min read
Innocence + Experience tour is back in the UK this autumn with its incredible screen wizardry. Video here.
Debunking the TED myth - 4min watch
Comedy skit to inspire the thought-leader within you - but really just to make you chuckle
The experience revolution and the conference - 3min read
Debunking the ingrained behaviours of traditional conferencing
Plastic fantastic - building blocks for events - 2min explore
Remodelled structures ideal for dividing up spaces
Inflatable fun - 4min explore
Go beyond a purely functional inflatable structure with these beautiful designs
Coming soon - spectacular London venue - 2min read
The MSG Sphere a mind-blowing venue from the company behind Madison Square Garden
Things to go to:
The London Mastaba
What's that floating on Serpentine?
Instagramable 'plant based' experience
Complete with avocado ball pit!
If there’s something interesting you think we should include, please share it via thatsinteresting@liveunion.co.uk
Augmented Reality - The new dimension for event audiences
A post by Katie Frettingham
Have you tried Ikea’s Place App?
Even if you’re not in the market for a chaise longue it’s worth a go. It’s a great example of just how useful Augmented Reality (AR) can be; allowing you to view furniture in-situ in your home before you buy.
Using AR to superimpose computer-generated images into the real world isn’t just great for home furnishing, it has many exciting uses within events.
Accessing AR content requires nothing more than scanning an AR code, using either your phone’s embedded functionality or an AR app. At Live Union we’re finding that more and more of our events are using AR and we now have all the necessary skills in-house to design and deploy content.
In short, AR allows you to add a whole new dimension to the audience experience and has both engagement and practical benefits.
Engagement Benefits of Augmented Reality:
- People are able to personalise their experience, choosing the content that is most relevant to them
- AR can produce a more reflective experience, delegates interacting with the content at their own pace, ideal for more introvert personality types.
- It can stimulate conversation and connections. For example, on an exhibition stand sales staff can navigate potential customers through a non-linear journey, forming deeper relationships and insights.
- AR can be used to gamify the experience, providing new ways to help people understand and retain ideas.
- The interaction doesn’t have to be a one off - applying AR to post-event materials can be a great way to amplify your content beyond the event itself.
Practical Benefits of Augmented Reality:
- AR can be applied to multiple surfaces, be it screens or printed collateral – this makes it extremely accessible and adaptable, depending on the space or target audience.
- If you’re tight for space but you have a lot of information you want to share AR could be the answer. For example, if you have an exhibition stand with a small footprint you can still have your ‘hero image’ but using AR opens up possibilities to showcase photos, videos, stats, links through to social media etc. – they simply build over the image which is already in place.
- The beauty about the overlay graphics is that they’re completely customisable – we can create bespoke items in line with your brand guidelines, or you can simply provide us with the assets and we will work in partnership with you to apply them and bring your image to life.
- You have the choice as to whether your audience use their own devices to interact with your AR content or you provide tablets or some combination of the two.
If you’d like to see some examples of AR in action in the event environment then do get in touch.
