Researching interactive crowd participation

To research the concept of interactive crowd participation we searched the internet for interesting videos, websites and articles on the subject. Here's a couple of the most interesting ones we found:

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McDonald's Save the Sundae Cone

People in the crowd open up an app to spin a fan and try to prevent the sundae shown on the billboard from melting. The fan on the screen moves faster when more people are spinning. Everyone who participates gets a voucher for a sundae. We could definitely do something similar to this the exception being that instead 1 to 5 people who participated would get a free sausage mug for example.

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Levi’s® Stadium mobile app

Another interesting find was Levi's Stadium mobile app which helps its users to buy tickets, navigate in the stadium area, order food and find replay videos of the games among other things. We feel like this was an inspiring idea and it sparked some additional thoughts on where this project might be going.

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Techniques for Interactive Audience Participation

 

In their article from the year 2002, Dan Maynes-Aminzade, Randy Pausch and Steve Seitz discussed the unique aspects of interactive audience participation: The focus on interactive crowd games should be on the activity, not technology. Although it may use an old technology, simple games have a higher chance to entertain the crowd. This is because the crowd has to understand the game and its goal immediately in order to cheer for it. That's why you have to make the control mechanisms obvious. You don't even have to sensor every member of the crowd, though it is important that they know they control the game. In the end you have to ramp up the difficulty of the game to make the it more interesting and bring the game to a point where the crowd is expected to lose and it doesn't go on forever. But it should contain pauses or lower paces in between for the crowd to cheer for themselves.

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Bannerbattle: introducing crowd experience to interaction design 

 

In their 2012 article, Rune Veerasawmy and Ole Sejer Iversen delved into the concept of designing interaction technologies for crowds such as the audience of a sports game. They viewed crowd situations as something quite unique compared to normal interaction between people and technology, especially since people tend to act in much more sociable way, and additionally their behavior is significantly more spontaneous. As such, the whole design aspect for the technologies must also follow its unique path.

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