Immersive booths to bring business expos to life
Technology
Technology that brings standard exhibition booths alive with video projections has launched this month.
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The immersive booth technology is the brainchild of Andy Roberts, the founder of Rogue Lumens, a technology company in Adelaide, South Australia.
In a previous role, Roberts had travelled the world attending conferences and was constantly uninspired by the static displays of posters and logos on show.
“At an exhibition in October 2016 I was standing there and it occurred to me that we could do a lot more in a booth by introducing new technology,” said Roberts.
He first looked into incorporating augmented or virtual reality but found the technology was not ready for a mass market.
“The uncomfortable interruption of having someone ask you to put something over your face in a crowded room is such that you just can’t do it. But we wanted to find a way we could produce an immersive type experience without having to interrupt someone naturally,” he said.
Roberts and his team came up with a software program that allows projectors to seamlessly turn the three sides of a standard 9sq m booth into screens.
The software package allows companies to upload photos or videos and easily produce them into an eye-catching display that moves across all three walls. Companies can also upload professionally-produced work.
“We built our own software and web portal to solve how we would populate this size of screen,” said Roberts.
The web portal allows users to see what their booth would look like from all angles as people approach the stall, and incorporates a human outline to ensure the scale is correct.
“It is all put together with a bespoke interface that companies can make with their own content – such as photos and video – and the software scales it,” said Roberts.
“We’ve had the luxury of actually being in the position of being at exhibitions so we are solving a problem we’ve had ourselves. We were thinking about the tools we would have wanted and we would have needed, which gives a very different insight on how you approach the problem.”
The business model is to approach expo hire companies to lease the technology for large conferences, which will keep prices comparable to normal booth kit out fees.
Roberts displayed the technology at the Adelaide Convention Centre this month, highlighting the work of IIoT company Dematec Automation.
“Because we have approached this with a price sensitive mindset there are no consumables, just a bit of labour, and this brings the price down,” said Roberts.
“We want to make a difference to conferences. We want to make sure that lots of booths look good, not just one or two, and that’s why we have worked hard to bring the price point down to a point that is acceptable to the people who are going to be exhibiting.”
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