It has been touted as world first, an Instagram vending machine!

The idea is simple – if you have Instagram, take a pic, tag it, get some swag! Or if you phone has NFC, tap it, fill in a form, submit it, get some swag!

Simple from the front, tons of moving parts in the background. Out backend dev handled the Instagram filtering and the collection and storage of usernames as only 1 piece of swag could be collected per person. He also provided me with a very nice method of retrieving the content I needed. Another dev created a proxy app for me to be able to talking to the vending machine and also get back information if something had failed or the machine was empty and needed refilling.

The machine proved very popular and it was pretty cool to be able to do a search using the designated hashtags of a show and see all the images. For the LA show nearly 3000 images were tagged.

I found these 2 images which I should thank the Instagram user for posting – One is the first taken and the other is it appearing on the vending machine.

The Swag Machine was 1 of 2 applications Spinifex produced, including the Mega Dashboard seen below dwarfing the swag machines on the right! The swag machine also passed some content to the Mega Dashboard via a TCP connection.

I did a screen capture to show the process in action – from tagging the image it was taking approx 10 seconds for the Swag Machine to have it queued up and ready to display and vend some swag.

Great fun interactive – something that you can’t do at home on your computer, plus something digital and physical to take away, perfect for an auto show.

JK