After Organic sponsored Richard Saul Wurman’s final EG2006 (Entertainment Gathering) conference, we were given the unique task of developing a memorable and interactive takeaway DVD for conference attendees.
History: EG conferences (A series of conferences similar to [TED][2]) are gatherings of some of the best and brightest minds across almost all sectors of industry. This project was not targeted at a wide audience, instead it was tuned to focus on the early adopters and innovators in fields from music to foreign policy.
We knew that simply producing a traditional DVD for this audience would simply not do, many of the best known coolhunters and trendsetters would be in our user base. With this in mind we worked out ways to incorporate the features your expect in a media presentation alongside elements never before seen on the platform, but familiar to our users (tagging, user generated content, etc).
To ensure that all users would feel comfortable in the system, we made sure that the expected UI elements of an offline DVD were in place (Play controls, Scene information, “Chapter” selection)
On top of this tried and true platform, we build a video tagging engine. Users can not only seen at a glance what topics would be covered in the coming presenters, but also highlight items of interest on the timeline throughout the conference (the DVD contains nearly 24 hours of footage). In this way a user could for instance check to see if their favorite topic or presenter (I love Bill Nye) springs up 8 hours later than where they are currently viewing.
Geek Note: Bill Nye presided over a wedding during the conference.
All of the previously mentioned tools made the DVD an elegant and immersive experience, what comes next is what made it really cool.
If the user of the DVD was connected to the net, the experience changed from being an archival view of things that had happened into a community that lives on past the conference itself.
Users are given tools to add their own tags and comments to the video which are shared with every future or current users of the site. Every time a user added something to the site (tags or comments through the tool, or photos on Flickr), it would immediately passed to anyone else viewing the DVD at the same time or at a later date.
Geek Note: Connection to the net was tested during the initial intro screen, users without an active connection were still able to view all of the content on disc locally, as well as a pre-populated list of time-coded tag markers.
