Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality Take Over Brisbane Festival 2017

25th August 2017

AND the countdown is on for the much-anticipated Brisbane Festival 2017 with opening night only a fortnight away! Kicking-off the annual arts festival on the eve of September 9, Brisbane City will soon be swarming with the best Australia has to offer in theatre, music, dance, circus, opera and explosive public events, and now, also the best in innovative technologies!

With an audience of around one million attendees every year, Brisbane Festival wanted 2017 to be the year to make its mark as one of Australia’s major international arts festivals and to show-off Brisbane’s innovative capacity as the leading creative technology city in Australia.

To bring the world of tech to the streets of South Bank, Brisbane Festival partnered with leading Brisbane-based experiential agency, Lightweave, to develop an integration of creativity, excitement and innovation for this year’s public engagement. This collaboration resulted in the birth of the festival’s first artificially intelligent public host, Frank, and in an entirely augmented-reality enabled marketing campaign bringing the festival experience to life like never before!

If there’s an area not to miss at the festival, it’s the hilarious, edging on risqué, Frank – an AI animated host, bringing the fun, cheek and comedy to the Treasury Brisbane Arcadia. Through the delights of artificial intelligence, Frank will pick you out of the crowd, chat with you in real time, joke, inform, invite you to upload images onto the big screen with him, inspire sing-a-longs, and perhaps playfully insult your outfit choice for the evening, all in his desire to #celebrateBrisbane. At 6 metres wide and 4 metres tall, Frank is the festival’s most unique host, and is a festival celebration you’ll fall in love with all day and all night.

For those at home who already have a copy of this year’s program, if you haven’t downloaded the Brisbane Festival App yet, you’ll be wanting to download it right now! Available on both the App store and Google Play, the Brisbane Festival App brings print collateral to life through the exciting medium of augmented reality. In a first for an Australian Festival, the free-to-download Brisbane Festival app brings campaign material to life with every page of the 2017 program being AR-enabled.

Festival goers can get a taste of the festivals line-up simply by pointing their phone at the pages of the Festival program or any print advertising, enabling them to see and hear performance previews, reviews and interviews, right off the physical page. The app also offers access to exclusive festival ticket deals through integrated ticket purchasing, encouraging attendees to secure tickets to the performances they most enjoy from the AR previews. With over 60 shows in the 2017 program, AR technology allows potential attendees to see exclusive video content and learn more about each show, making choosing which shows to see even easier.

As a total technology take-over, Brisbane Festival is a must-see for everything in entertainment and in new public engagement technologies. Brisbane Festival is a remarkable 3 weeks of show-stopping performances and energetic creativity, and is an essential event for anyone within the Brisbane vicinity. Come along and #celebrateBrisbane!