Do weddings follow the same contact patterns as offices and hospitals?

A wedding cocktail hour became a natural laboratory for studying how people mingle. Using wearable sensors, researchers tracked 95 guests and their 1.5-meter proximity contacts over 46 minutes, capturing 7,213 interactions mapped to self-reported relationships (friend, family, colleague, etc.). The result fills a gap: most social-network data comes from schools, hospitals, or offices where rules shape mixing. Here, guests organized themselves freely—revealing whether contact patterns like clustering and bursty dynamics that show up in structured settings also emerge when no authority is directing the flow.