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TopBarcodes on wristbands have been applied in health care typically to promote patient safety, such as patient identification to eliminate medical errors and medication mistakes (Mun, Kantrowitz, Carmel, Mason, & Engels, 2007). However, in the area of mobile social applications (Smith, 2005; Thom-Santelli, 2007) barcodes have mainly been applied to link physical objects in the environment to available information (Hansen & Grønbæk, 2008). Other applications of barcodes include games (Schmidmayr, Ebner, & Kappe, 2008), situated learning (Kurti, Milrad, & Spikol, 2007), tourist applications (O’Hara & Kindberg, 2007), focusing on the barcode augmenting a physical object with information typically presented through a mobile device. Thus the use of 2D barcodes for festival participant identification in this study is a novel approach. Swedberg (2009) reports on the use of RFID as identification technique used on tickets at the Ohio Music Festival, however, the experiment did not include other applications of RFID in the festival context. Zeni, Kiyavitskaya, Barbera, Oztaysi, and Mich (2009) employed RFID for crowd tracking at different festival events.
In the present study the 2D barcodes allow us to use low-cost off-the-shelf solutions as the means to support social network interaction, and thereby enable quick and cheap prototyping of different social network applications, such as interaction by means of situated displays in a festival setting. Prior work on large situated displays has focused on applications in CSCW research and groupware systems (Brignull & Rogers, 2003; Churchill, Girgensohn, Nelson, & Lee, 2004; Greenberg & Rounding, 2001). Tuulos, Scheible, and Nyholm (2007) describe how mobile phones and large public displays were used in a large-scale game involving collaborative story writing in an urban environment. An experiment with social interaction on a situated display in a festival setting has been tested using a collaborative story writing game (a WAP based solution) by Coulton, Bamford, and Edwards (2008) and Peltonen et al. (2007) experimented with additional touch-based interaction on large displays. Jacucci, Oulasvirta, Ilmonen, Evans, and Salovaara (2007) carried out field trials with CoMedia as an approach to support spectators in event coordination and sharing of media and presence at large-scale events (such as a music festival) using mobile phones.