Oktoberfest, a two-week festival held each year in Munich, Germany during late September and early October sees six million people each year and has inspired numerous similar events using the name Oktoberfest in Germany and around the world. It finds its roots in history in 1810 when citizens of Munich were invited to attend the festivities to celebrate the happy royal event.
The festival today has moved out to various places of the world, Canada holds the largest fest outside of Germany followed by Brazil and US. In India the fest celebrated its 10th year, thanks to Kingfisher, the Indian beer brand brewed by the United Breweries Group, Bangalore for organizing The Kingfisher Premium Great Indian Octoberfest (TGIOF).
Every year the festival has brought tech and social innovations along with good music, food and of course beer, for offline as well as its online fans. The recently concluded three day fest saw some interesting innovations which are listed below:
1. Drones doling out beer
Yes you read it right, drones were shipping the beers at the event. In specially designated areas of the festival, remotely controlled flying devices hovered in the air and dropped cans of beer at the command of the Beer Control Centre.
2. Oculus Rift in action at KFBeerCoaster
The festival brought the excitement of Oculus Rift – an upcoming virtual reality head-mounted display. Visitors sat on motion chairs in a virtual reality booth who were then taken for a roller coaster ride in a virtual reality environment. As the visitors went through the thrilling experience, pulse meters capping their fingers kept track of their pulse rate. This pulse meter then sent a signal to a beer dispenser attached to the motion chairs.
3. Dynamic moving images booth
The old-time fairground photo booth got a makeover at the fest with the‘dynamic moving images booth’. These booths were installed across the venue and visitors captured their static photographs which was then converted into dynamic moving images. Later on the images got uploaded on social media and were tagged.
4. The Headbang Arena
Carrying forward last year’s big hit among fans Headbang Arena got bigger and better this time. This time two visitors, competing against each other, were strapped with the sensors which recorded their headbanging. The count displayed LIVE on screens and a bulb representing the competitor with the highest score lights up with the beer dispenser doled out beer.
5. Hoezaay brings the magic of VineIf all this wasn’t enough Kingfisher got Hoezaay – that funny guy from MTV who just rolled on Vine with his madness. Check the above Vine videos to know what I mean.
6. Magic on Instagram too
A video posted by kingfisherworld (@kingfisherworld) on Oct 10, 2014 at 9:02pm PDT
A video posted by kingfisherworld (@kingfisherworld) on Oct 10, 2014 at 11:25am PDT
With more than a thousand and half followers on its Instagram page, Kingfisher made sure to keep the fun going on the photo network with contests, updates of the event and videos.
Events in India are all of a sudden looking tech and social equipped to match the crazy fans. We saw the same happening at the recently concluded Wills India Fashion Week which introduced drones to capture the best moments and used Instagram in seven cool ways during the event.