By Carolyn Heneghan

As the summer festival season comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on what we’ve learned to improve our experience next year. Need to wear shoes that can get amazingly muddy? Need to bring ponchos or toilet paper next year? How about needing to consider using more wearable technology in the future?

Wearable technology is the next frontier after creating monster computers the size of your palm. This technology could be beneficial for everything from fitness to hands-free calls, but it also has some unique possibilities for use at music festivals.

Wearable Tech Already Put to Use

We’ve already seen wearable wristband tickets which can be scanned for entry and worn throughout a festival. While at times uncomfortable, these bands are one way to eliminate the need for paper tickets and paper wristbands that can wear and tear from normal festival use.

And what about the shirts that light up to the beat of the music? Those too have been around awhile, and they’ve grown in popularity as they’ve become more technically impressive.

These wristbands and fashion statements are just a couple examples of how wearable technology is already being put to use. But there are other technologies being developed that you’ll see more and more of at upcoming music fests.

Insider Band at Outside Lands 2013

About a month ago, San Francisco’s Outside Lands found itself to be a test drive of ClearHart Digital’s Insider Band. Esurance and ClearHart set up eight 14-foot towers throughout Golden Gate Park, each armed with NFC-enabled Nexus 7 tablets mounted on all four sides. To make use of these towered tablets, participants registered for a free wristband online, which they then connected to their Facebook accounts.

For all who registered for a band, the user would tap that band on the tower and would then be able to check in to that location, take a photo or send a message to Facebook friends who had also registered for an Insider Band. That data could then either be stored and accessed the following week or posted immediately to Facebook.

If a user’s phone died or had poor reception, all he or she had to do was visit one of these towers to complete at least some of the actions they would have normally performed with their smartphone, such as find friends or check in at a location, without worry.

As any test drive might end up, there were a few snags along the way, such as long lines to receive a functional Insider Band because of spotty Wi-Fi in the Esurance tent. But all in all, the project seemed to be pretty successful with 8,060 users who tapped 29,753 times and uploaded 4,780 photos throughout the festival.

Smartwatches

Smartwatches have been around for a little while now, but this month, the industry releases two new models, the Samsung Galaxy Gear and the Sony SmartWatch 2, with Apple reportedly on their heels for a smartwatch release in 2014. Besides telling the time, how can these smartwatches really help at a music festival?

The Sony’s SmartWatch 2 will have 300 apps released in tandem with the device itself, more than four times as many as Samsung’s Galaxy Gear at 70 apps. But if you’re a fan of checking in, tweeting, sharing Facebook statuses and uploading photos of all the action, both smartwatches will allow you to do that. The social network Path’s app also allows you to share photos, post locations and allow feedback, similar to its online site.

Have trouble keeping up or meeting up with friends? One of Galaxy Gear’s apps, Glympse, can enable someone to be tracked using the app, and you can figure out where that person is just by glancing at the watch’s screen. Those people will have to have the app on their smartphones too, but it could still come in handy.

The SmartWatch 2 hasn’t released a list of many of its apps yet, but there’s a good chance that some of the apps you might normally use at a festival will be on there as well—if not in the future, possibly by next year’s summer fest season.

Google Glass

While the commercial version of Google Glass is still not yet available, developers are creating more and more apps that may eventually be of some use to festival goers—as long as they can keep the glasses on while jumping around in the crowd.

Imagine a Google Glass app that allows you to pull up live Twitter updates from other users about a festival set while it is actually happening. Or a map app that pulls up the trackable locations of your friends onscreen and directs you exactly to the spot they’re at. Or a camera that snaps a picture with every hard blink, hands-free.

The possibilities are endless as Google Glass slowly becomes a reality. App developers will assuredly come up with uses beyond our wildest fest tech fantasies, and it will be exciting to see where it goes in the coming years.

Wearable technology for music festivals is still in its infancy, but it shows great promise. Let’s wait and see what tech companies have in store for us by summer fest season 2014.

Comments

comments