ATLANTA -- Many of the displays at IWF featured touch screens, videos and more ways for attendees to engage.

Video screens showed the product in action, often in larger and more colorful formats than in the past.

At Stiles Machinery, a large video screen greeted visitors coming into the display. Attendees could press a product category and see where the machines of that type were in the display. On the Stiles screen, visitors could press “moulders” for example and see the locations of those machines highlighted.

Steve Waltman of Stiles Machinery explained that more videos provided a greater user experience.

More videos of plant operations were seen than in past years.

During the show, attendees and exhibitors provided a stream of tweets and online images and posts to keep others up to date.

No matter whether the displays were large or small, however, every company had real live people on hand to engage with attendees.

Final attendee numbers won’t be available for several weeks, but likely will be considerably higher than the last exhibition in 2014. This year, there were 1,080 exhibitors using 531,000 square feet of space.