Touch Solutions in Interactive Signage
March 19, 2012, Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Education Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Neeraj Pendse from TE Touch Solutions talked about interactive digital signage. This growing marketplace is changing the way companies are supplying information in public areas.
Digital signage is a $2 B industry, and is expected to grow to $3 B by ’16. The market includes hardware, software, and content creators. The latest wrinkle is interactivity, which changes the way the displays supply information to bring the Web into the store. The interactive displays have higher complexity than an iPad and need art, networking, and social sciences to make a good display. The new business model positions information to sell ads, property information and any associated high value, complex products.
The large products use social inputs to change behaviors in the stores. Agencies are designing interactive content for retail, healthcare, hospitality, financial, educational, transportation, and sports facilities. One growing requirement is a need for standard interfaces and a common hardware structure and model.
The systems take a lot of work to design, including content creation, management, networking, and the display. Interactive displays are like TV, with Web interactivity. The complete installation requires changes to the network topology to enable the interactivity. One part of the interactivity is the touch interface, which is becoming a normal and intuitive technology. Unfortunately, the various touch technologies all fit into different niches, and none fit all categories.
In addition to touch, some of the displays are including video analytics—age, sex, individual or group, etc.—to provide data feedback to measure the content impact and relevancy. The analytics can expand to include face or voice recognition, RFID, and mobile device linking. Ongoing research is looking at other facets of touch and of gestures. Like a Kinect, gestures have to be personal and for a specific task.
The challenges for the interactive displays are in the social sciences, new technologies and standards. Designs have to consider the marketing and communications aspects of the displays and have highly reliable technologies. The end point is the display, but the server end needs to address the non-standard interactions while enabling ad networks and other management issues. Content development needs to be refined, because displaying privatized information in a public setting can raise many issues.
There are limited standards for the displays. They all have some form of serial I/O and a plug-in CPU, but that is the extent of the commonality. The ads themselves have to change measurement models to a cost per impression. Current metrics for 1-way media are in cost per thousand clicks, but the math and science are available to get this down to an individual person level.
