A Festival-wide Social Network using 2D Barcodes, Mobile Phones and Situated Displays

In this paper we report our experiences with an exploratory prototype festival-wide social network applying unique 2D barcodes on wristbands and mobile phones to uniquely identify the festival participants. Experiments were carried out at the CO2PENHAGEN music festival in Denmark. We describe a set of social network applications involving participant profiles, a microblog and images shared on situated displays, and competitions created for the festival and our experiences from initial use of these.

The pilot study included 73 participants each creating a unique profile. We found that our novel approach had potential to enable anyone at the festival to participate in the festival-wide social network, as participants did not need any special hardware or mobile client application to be involved. The 2D barcodes was found to be a feasible low-cost approach for unique participant identification and social network interaction, and we discuss the implications for the design of future systems of this nature.