At the Professional Convention Management Association’s 2018 Convening Leaders conference this week in Nashville, Tenn., Alex Rolfe, director of event solutions, Cvent, showed an audience of event planners some new options to improve the attendee journey and make your event more memorable this year.
The Invitation
A Japanese company sent out invitations to a trade show by mail, and included a foldable plastic pyramid screen and the web address for a video invitation. A pyramid screen is a piece of plastic that folds into a pyramid and is placed on a smart-phone screen. When the video or gif is played on the phone, the images appear in the pyramid as a hologram. Click here to see examples of phone holograms.
The Shuttle Bus
Autonomous vehicles are moving out of the test phase and becoming a real transportation option. In September 2017, the United Arab Emirates launched the world’s first drone taxi service. Called a volocopter, two passengers can ride a mini helicopter for up to 30 minutes over a predetermined route. In the U.S., Olli from Local Motors, is a driverless shuttle bus that can ferry attendees from hotel to convention center. Olli can carry up to 12 passengers and is currently available in Las Vegas and Miami.
The Registration Line
Attendees are used to self-check-in kiosks at registration, but robotic kiosks will become more common this year. The advantage is that these kiosks can be sent from uncrowded areas, to areas where lines are long, cutting wait times and saving registrant’s shoe leather.
The Conference
Remember those kiosk robots? If an attendee can’t make it at the last minute, in the future they will be able to rent a robot onsite to attend the sessions, livestream them, and ask questions. The robot will participate in the event at the direction of the missing attendee.
The Presentation
If the attendee does make it to the event, technology can transport them somewhere else without the need for passports or planes. A gala dinner in aid of Charity: Water provided Samsung Gear VR headsets to guests so that they could experience (almost) firsthand the struggle villagers in Africa go through in order to get clean water. The emotional connection from the immersive experience prompted an increase in donations for the organization, and a memorable night for the attendees. You can watch the 360-degree video (without the VR component) here.
