Digital Signage that Captivates
Terry Schmidt · Information Display · 2013
What catches your eye enough to make you pause?As we drive along a freeway, walk a shopping mall, or just hurry though the airport to catch a flight, we are bombarded with hundreds of messages from advertisers every day.What constitutes effective advertising?What messages, what types of displays, work best?Digital signage is a relatively young market with a wide variety of applications, venues, and hardware.This makes global tracking of this industry very difficult, but the industry appears to be burgeoning.Dave Haynes is a co-founder of The Preset Group, which advises end users and vendors on digital-signage projects.David says: "The digital-signage industry has seen rapid growth in the last 2 or 3 years -after many years of 'next year is going to be the year this takes off.'What finally made it happen was the reduction in the costs of large-format display panels, better energy efficiency, and slimmer bezels (the frames of these displays).What has also helped are much more ubiquitous and reliable broadband, better video-compression technology (smaller file sizes), and a crazy amount of software providers, which has forced down costs."Certainly, digital signage appears to be a multibillion dollar industry with healthy growth, from U.S. $1.3 billion in 2010, projected to grow to $4.5 billion in 2016 (ABI Research) and $13.8 billion in 2017 (Global Industry Analysts).Various building blocks of a digital-signage system encompass hardware such as eye-catching displays, servers, and media players, as well as software to organize, distribute, and display.Ultimately, however, the success of a digital-signage project boils down to the content and the content-creation software, which must satisfy the business objectives and the ROI of the customer.Simplicity and low cost are the keys to widespread adoption.Also, matching the right display technology to the application is essential.Very-large direct-view LED displays can be effective for outdoor signs such as roadside electronic billboards, but for closer viewing, high-resolution video walls can be custom designed from stackable components that range from small rearprojection displays (e.g., Christie MicroTiles) to narrow-bezel LCD flat panels.New low-cost ARM-processor-based media players, HTML5 content-creation software, and exciting new video-wall and projection-mapping displays are all contributing to make digital signage a dynamic and exciting business opportunity.Recently, the support of rich content at relatively low cost is now possible with HTML5 on affordable hardware.A notable example of this is the PiCube from Finnish company FirstView Digital Signage, which is able to display full HD (1080p) video and images from a credit-card-sized single-board computer (the Raspberry Pi from the UK initiative of the same name).The media-player hardware itself is free; FairView charges a monthly subscription fee for an online account with associated services to manage the content However, the ability of digital-signage content to captivate an audience and effectively transmit a message is greatly dependant on the display that is used.A number of promising new display technologies are in development and there are also advances in the use of sensors to make digital-signage displays more interactive.Ted Sun of Sun Innovations, who presented two interesting papers on his eye-catching, transparentscreen projection technology at Display Week 2013, has written an article for this issue.He explains how this and other novel display innovations can be used to