Augmenting Halloween

High Tea is an organization that promotes new and established names in the drum 'n bass scene by organizing live shows and festivals. High Tea events often have a theme that is applied in the decoration of the location and the branding of the event. On October 25th, in a sold out Melkweg Amsterdam, the theme was Trick or Treat. In other words: Halloween. With our AR tool, High Tea developed a number of mobile Augmented Reality experiences to give the Melkweg a spooky theme.

For High Tea, the focus of the event is on the one hand promoting the artists and on the other hand organizing a great evening program for the audience. Because it is important that the attention is not distracted too much from the artists, we decided in consultation that we would use AR for the decoration of the event outside the main hall. The AR is therefore visible outside in the line where people are waiting to get in and in various places in the lobby and toilets.

Within our work, we are not only looking for the best way to apply AR for pop stages, but we are also looking for good workflows so that we can discover who should do what when you want to use AR. In this use case, we coordinated the process with Melkweg, which facilitates the space, and the organizer of the evening, High Tea. High Tea asked two VJs from their own organization to design the AR visuals and Melkweg was consulted about where these could best be placed. 

The VJs designed five AR experiences that they placed outside and inside the building as a kind of treasure hunt. They had printed posters with QR codes for this purpose so that they could scan the experiences. The VJs indicated that they were able to handle the AR tool well, but that they would like to have a little more control over the movements of the objects. It is not always clear what the different values ​​in the tool mean in relation to the size or speed of a movement. They also indicated that they would benefit greatly from a timeline functionality where you can link a change of AR scene to a time.

The idea of ​​using AR to decorate the space and to bring the concept of the party to life worked well. The AR offered added value and provided an extra dimension in the decoration of the party. Melkweg clearly has a facilitating role for the party and it therefore worked well that the organizer of the party, High Tea, designs the AR experiences themselves. and coordinates with Melkweg how they can best offer them on the evening itself.

On the other hand, it became clear during the evening that many people do not know what AR is. It therefore has little added value to promote the experience as 'AR'. It is better to call it an extra experience or give it a different title. The placement of the QR codes also turned out not to be correct. As a result, the QR codes of the AR experience were confused with functional QR codes of, for example, the lockers. It was also not always clear that they were different experiences and that it was therefore interesting to scan all the individual posters and view the experiences.

In conclusion, the evening has taught us that the examined workflow has a lot of potential, but that we need to look more critically at how we offer the QR codes. The conceptual embedding of the AR experience in the horror theme offered clear added value for the party.