Arts Festival App Connects Visitors and Artists

For years, Penn State’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction has worked with the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts to provide a mobile app to enhance the experience of hundreds of artists and more than 140,000 visitors to the annual summer event.

And with each year brings new features.

‘Each version of the application retains core features, such as a schedule and program of events, location data, and profiles of the visiting artists and performers,’ said center director and Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Jack Carroll. ‘With previous iterations, the CHCI has experimented with various types of social features and interactions.’

This year, the Arts Fest App seeks to better connect attendees and artists. Carroll said that the 2016 version, available for iOS in the iTunes store, allows artists to modify their profiles and post statuses and updates about their booths and what they are selling. Those status updates can be cross-posted to Twitter with the hashtag #ArtsFestApp.

For visitors to the festival, the new feature lets them use the app to view and reply to the artists’ updates, and learn more about the artists who populate the Allen Street and roads on the University Park campus for four days.

‘This interaction hopes to create a greater sense of connection and awareness between both halves of the Arts Fest, whereas in prior years most of the development focus was on attendees,’ Carroll said.

Previous versions have experimented with a variety of different features. In 2014, the app was used for a ‘selfie’ game among festival-goers, and last year the app had a set of individual interest categories the ability to create custom events.

Along with Carroll, the research group for this year’s Arts Fest App includes IST research associate Ben Hanrahan, lecturer Jess Kropczynski and postdoctoral scholar Tina Yuan; graduate students Richard Wirth, Jiawei Chen, Sooyeon Lee, and Jomara Binda; and undergraduate students Mecca Shabazz, Alejandro Cuevas, Heather Johnson, Junggue Yang, Jin Zhang.