People who visit Montreal’s Igloofest for a night of music and dancing come dressed for warmth in heavy coats and mittens. During the outdoor event, which is being held this year during a series of three-day weekends from Jan. 17 through Feb. 9, temperatures regularly plunge to -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 degrees Celsius) and winds can whip through the site at a speed of 50 kilometers per hour (31 miles per hour). To read bar codes printed on reusable passes and paper tickets, or displayed on mobile phones, workers at the entrance gate must clutch a bar-code scanner in a hand wearing a mitten with a heating pad insert. Not surprisingly, this can be a clumsy process—and if the temperatures become cold enough, the bar-code scanners might simply cease to function.
This year, in order to test a solution to these problems, Igloofest and Ticketpro Canada, the festival’s ticketing services provider, installed an RFID-based system for use by pass holders (the bar-code system is still in place for attendees with single-day paper or smartphone tickets). The RFID solution is designed to read a high-frequency (HF) 13.56 MHz RFID tag built into an attendee’s weekend or season pass, simply by having that individual place the plastic-coated card next to a reader. The system includes software and an RFID interrogator developed by Premières Loges. The RFID technology—which has been in operation for pass holders at one gate throughout the month-long festival this year—has made the process of admitting and accounting for attendees more reliable and more efficient, reports Sarah Girouard, Igloofest’s box office manager.
The annual outdoor music festival, held at the Old Port of Montreal‘s Jacques Cartier Quay, was launched in 2007 as a winter rave to bring electronic music to fans who could sample a variety of DJ talent, while dancing to stay warm in the outdoor area during the season of the coldest nights of the year. Initially, the event attracted only a few thousand people, but the event’s organizers expect that combined attendance for Igloofest’s 12 nights will reach 70,000 this year. Attendees have a choice of buying a ticket onsite for a single evening, or purchasing a pass granting them entrance for multiple nights—either an entire weekend, or for the length of the one-month festival.
Ticketpro Canada has been providing a ticketing solution consisting of plastic-coated multi-day passes and paper single-day tickets that individuals can purchase online and pick up at various sites, single single-day tickets (purchased at Jacques Cartier Quay on the night of a given event, or electronic tickets purchased online that can be displayed on a mobile phone. The management of ticket purchases and access control is provided by Ticketpro, using software created for the company by Premières Loges. At the gate, every ticket or pass must be scanned by the staff via a bar-code scanner, Girouard says, because Igloofest’s planners need to know the exact number of people being admitted at any time. The festival, she says, “has important concerns about the capacity of the site.”
While most paper tickets are purchased at the gate at the time of the event, some attendees buy passes and paper tickets online or at various retail stores throughout Montreal, making it difficult to know how many people have arrived on any particular night. Scanning every ticket or pass at Jacques Cartier Quay, and managing the collected ticket data using Ticketpro software, helps the festival to ensure that it does not admit more visitors than the site can safely accommodate.Scanning bar codes, however, can be slow when everyone involved is wearing mittens. And if temperatures fall low enough, the scanners will simply fail.
To address this problem, Ticketpro asked Premières Loges to design an RFID-based solution. The result was the Cerberus RFID reader and credit-card-sized plastic-coated passes containing passive HF 13.56 MHz RFID inlays made with NXP Semiconductors Mifare chips. The plastic-coated cards are worn around an attendee’s neck, explains Guislaine Bulman, Ticketpro Canada’s director of software development, and a Cerberus reader is mounted at the entrance gate and cabled to the back-end system, where Ticketpro software receives, interprets and processes all ticketing data from both bar-code scans and RFID reads.
Ticketpro began working on an RFID solution to the bar-code ticketing problems last year. It tested several existing readers, Bulman says, but found that none was inexpensive or light enough to meet the needs of Igloofest or Ticketpro Canada’s other clients. Therefore, Ticketpro approached Premières Loges, asking that it develop a better solution. Ticketpro sought a reader small and light enough to ship to a festival or conference, and simple enough for a worker to plug it in and immediately being using it. Mathieu Dupuis, Premières Loges’ CEO, says that his company employed off-the-shelf RFID hardware to build the reader, which measures approximately 8 inches by 5 inches—about the size of an Apple iPad. Ticketpro Canada, which offers the reader as part of its complete ticketing solution, has declined to provide a specific price for the reader itself.
Pass buyers made their purchases online at the Igloofest site via the Ticketpro server and software. They paid for the pass and uploaded a photograph of themselves, and then received notification that the payment was received, as well as where they could pick up their pass. According to Bulman, the company chose passive HF RFID tags specifically because it wanted a short read range, in order to reduce the confusion that could result utilizing an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tag, which has a longer reader range tag. Although a UHF tag could be read as an attendee walked through a portal, stray reads could be picked up from other passes in the vicinity. What’s more, Igloofest wanted visitors to pass through the entrance gate one at a time so that their identity could be verified, thus making HF technology the best choice for this application.Upon arriving at Jacques Cartier Quay, pass holders proceed to the Cerberus reader. When a pass is held next to the device, the tag’s ID number is transmitted to the Ticketpro server for validation. If the ID corresponds with records related to those allowed entrance for that night, the admission is approved and Cerberus’ indicator light changes from blue to green. The individual then continues through the gate to present his or her picture to a staff member prior to entering. Meanwhile, the software updates the quantity of people onsite. If the ticket is not approved for that night’s concert, the Cerberus light turns red and an Igloofest worker then instructs the individual to return to the box office.
About 1,500 RFID-enabled passes have been used to date. Girouard says pass holders have been enthusiastic about the system, which is easier to use than having their passes’ bar codes scanned, and provides a fun, “high-tech” element to admissions. Igloofest has continued to employ the traditional bar-coded paper tickets for those purchasing electronic tickets and one-time only entrance passes at the gate. Because the passes are purchased online in advance of the show and are reusable, however, Igloo opted to utilize RFID technology in them, rather than in paper tickets.
Next year, Girouard says, Igloofest hopes to use the RFID system for admitting all pass holders, including media, DJs, the event staff and others who have access to the event for more than just one evening. She has yet to decide whether or not to expand the use of RFID to paper tickets, and says that Igloofest will continue to work with Ticketpro to develop future solutions, though she is unable to indicate any specific details at this time.
Ticketpro is presently in discussions with other customers as well, including festivals and conference managers, about deploying the technology at their events.