Seat Lost&Sound brings augmented reality to major music festivals

the 50% European large companies will have implemented an augmented reality and/or virtual reality strategy in 2020, according to data from consultancy IDC Research Spain.

More and more companies are betting on augmented reality to improve customer experience and consumer interaction. According to the consultant IDC Research Australia, the 50% European large companies will have implemented an augmented reality and/or virtual reality strategy in 2020.

The data from this consultancy estimated that the global investment actually increased for this year would exceed 20.000 millions of dollars worldwide, while pointing out that an upward trend is expected until 2022, with a growth of a 69,6% since 2012. concretely, western Europe estimates an investment of 1.740 millions to 2022.

One of the most interesting applications of this technology is to improve the user experience in busy places or as a form of simple and playful orientation. In this context, the Spanish startup Wildbytes– an experienced innovation agency that designs and produces events based on experiences and facilities with state-of-the-art digital technology– has created, in collaboration with Google, the first augmented reality app (Ra) geolocation for big events, which has just premiered at the Primavera Sound festival by Seat.

Laia Zanon, creative production director of Wildbytes in Barcelona, states that "what people are looking for is not a purely playful use of RA, apps help them or solve a problem. This app we've created combines both elements: the attractive factor that has in itself the use of RA with a real solution to a problem faced by attendees of a big event: how to find your friends among thousands of people and have fun along the way?"

Primavera Sound 2019 launches the app

Barcelona's festival Primavera Sound, that has finished editing 2019 with assistance from more than 220.000 between concerts around the city and those concentrated in the Parc del Forum and its seventeen stages, based on the data provided, with Rosalía's performance setting a record in her twenty-year history.

Music festivals are particularly busy places, where it's often very easy to lose friends. "Seat has a very close relationship with the world of music festivals, and with this app we are exceeding the limits in terms of what is possible with technologies like geolocation and augmented reality to make the experience even more impressive. Our partnership with Google and Wildbytes has been key to making such an amazing app come true", says Susanne Franz, Global Marketing Director of Seat.

Under the name of Seat Lost&Sound, this app allows you to locate friends using your smartphone thanks to augmented reality, simply scanning the space with the device's camera. In case you want to find a friend, when you open the app, a sign appears in the sky in the form of the icon you choose, indicating its position within the crowd and its distance from the seeker.

Users can send a signal so their friends know where they are, in addition to requesting that they share their signal. If the user is currently inactive, you'll receive a notification to access your friends' location the next time you open the app. In addition, the playful part of the app allows you to customize personal signals using 3D elements (a giant hand, a piece of pizza, a teddy bear of gummy, a lot of balloons…) moving over the location.

On the process of creating the application, "The main challenges we faced were in the app's user experience," Zanon recalls.; the functionality of using RA to place people in a physical space is still very recent, so we had to figure out what we were doing to get people to use it".

technically, the challenge was to get the best possible geographic location, como añade la directiva de Seat “que está limitada por la actual precisión que ofrece el GPS. last, we also work to achieve the playful factor, what we achieve thanks to the digital signals and icons that users can choose to represent themselves".

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