New technology will change engagement through digital signage

Digital signage is on its way to becoming a media category of its own, one that can create new experiences for each and every person, experiences that can literally change every time someone new comes in contact with a particular screen. The potential uses for digital signage are in an ever-expanding flight of the imagination.

I am always impressed by the impact of technology on media and then the impact that will have on us as viewers and media creators: Even how we define "viewer" is in flux right now.

Looking back at the technology advances of the last year and where these may lead us, we can see where "viewer" will become "participant" in the near- and long-term future.

In the near term, displays have delivered on the HD promise, but where do we go from here? What about the connected technology that creates a whole new form of engagement?

When I speak about connected technology I am talking about multilevel, multidynamic, multidimensional connections. These areas have and will create largely new, connected display systems that will transform our viewers into engaged participants.

In one type of connected displays, we haved a digital signage network that allows us to change content, update ads, and receive feedback in what I call "Linear Connectedness."

In another we have multitouch monitors, MediaTile's Human Kiosk and Gesturetech's new Cube, which allows for gestural engagement through moving one's hands or body, creating another type of connectedness, what I call "Participant Connectedness."

Another type digital signage participant connectedness came with the leaps forward in mobile and User Generated Content (UGC) adding a new, deeper-level and lasting participant connectedness, which I call "Latent Participant Connectedness." This latent connectedness is hidden, where the viewer participates now and later through an ongoing dialogue through mobile.

We also recently were introduced to the new MicroTiles from Christy Digital, a system that has a new type of connectedness where each cube is stacked or placed side by side and each screen knows it is connected to the other. I call this "Linear-Spatial Connectedness." This is the first step to a connectedness that evolves to something I call "Spatial-Connectedness."

And this is where we start getting into the real heart of what is possible with digital signage in the future.

The idea of spacial-connectedness comes from the term "spatial operating system" coined by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong.

It's no coincidence that the movie Minority Report has become synonymous with the future of digital signage, since Underkoffler served as the chief science advisor on the film – and he based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT.

We are well on our way to seeing that science fiction, like so many times before, can become science fact.

To begin to understand how Underkoffler and his team will impact digital signage, we must look deep into the technology we use today to interact with various screens and content.

That technology is what drives the way in which we interact with the media – and, thus, why we create media in the form as we know it today for any screen.

Today, even though we think of ourselves as having very sophisticated tools and control over our interactions, we're still dealing with technology that is effectively 40 years old. When it comes to manipulating the content, shifting or affecting it in some way, the majority of our interactions rely on mouse and keyboard to manipulate a graphical user interface (GUI). All those ideas were operating in recognizable form by the early 1970s and commercialized ten years later. Since then, we've added the ability to manipulate that same GUI with voice in limited ways, and there has been recent movement to add touchscreen technology to that, largely in mobile.

And that, Underkoffler says, has limited our sense of what we can really do with content.

"I think that once you crack the history of media open a little bit, one can see where it has to go - to a more profoundly deep interaction. I don't think you can get that far necessarily by only permitting the consumer, the recipient, of the medium to have a superficial or shallow interaction." Underkoffler said. "So for us at Oblong, that's why gestural input and more generally what we're calling a spatial operating environment is really crucial."

This concept of a spatial operating environment is at the very core of what we saw in Minority Report, and what will change the way we think about and interact with media.

Underkoffler is about to literally change our point of view about digital signage by creating a new approach to interacting with media that vastly broadens interactions from the "tiny keyhole" into the broadest gestures.

"So for us, the key recognition is not even so much gestural input and gestural interaction as it is the more general idea of spatial interaction," he has said. "Now we've drifted away from the one person, one computer, one screen paradigm. People are likely to have a bunch of screens around them, whether they're expressly connected to you because they're all attached to the machine or machines you're using, or you're walking through some public environment of the sort that digital signage concerns itself with."

To wit, if one is in a particular environment with digital signage everywhere, then to think about coherent interaction with the entire environment (rather than a single screen), one has to take in account three-dimensional space. This is not only the placement of the screens, but also how to interact with them simultaneously.

"The computational substance behind those screens has to understand space. Fundamentally understand space in a way that's never happened before," he said. "If you lift up the hood on any modern day operating system, you'll see that it doesn't understand space. At best it thinks that a display is kind of an abstract collection of pixels. You talk about x and y and that's all you have. And the x and y can refer to the pixels on the screen kind of in the local coordinate system of the screen, but you know it doesn't have any sense of what happens if you turn the screen 90 degrees, or if the screen is moving because it's a laptop and you're carrying it around with you, or it's your cell phone or your watch, or it's on the roof of a taxi."

When we consider Underkoffler's vision of expanding the operating system to not only include each screen in an environment, but also consider the interface and the very depth of every screen, one begins to expand one's vision of what future content may look like, how to interact with it and how it may be created.

"Already the possibility of motion is kind of ignored," he said. "And then the fact that screen might be arrayed around a room or arrayed in a space at a bunch of different angles, and sizes, and orientations is also something that existing operating systems just don't get."

What Oblong has been doing is essentially teaching the machine about space, and its position in it, using what is essentially a new concept for an operating system. In this new world, the machine no longer thinks of the screen as a flat abstract collection of pixels but as a real object, in the real world, that exists at a particular location and has a relationship to other things in the environment based on that location.

It is also aware that the pixels it displays have a particular size based on the screen in use. There are small screens and big screens. And the screens are at a particular orientation. It's mounted on the ceiling, it's mounted on the walls, it's on the hinged top of a laptop, it's in your pocket. The point is, it has a particular location that matters with respect to the viewer.

Underkoffler believes that as soon as you have a spatially aware machine, and as soon as you put the human in the same frame of reference, then all of a sudden there's a new and very important kind of connection between the person and the machine:

"And at that point the gestural self, at least the way we mean it, falls out for free automatically, which is to say that you know when you point at the screen, if we know where your hand is, what your fingers are doing, where they are in space, we also know where the pixels on the screen are in the room coordinates, then the rest is really easy geometry. Because the computer and the screen and the people are all now finally understood to exist in the same space, there's a way to connect them in a really deep way. That gets us back around to the idea of deep interactions."

When one begins to think about how this relationship works within the bounds of a display and then expands the thinking beyond just one display, one then opens the mind to even a different world of content and interaction. When we look and the type of connectedness this will drive and the type of content that will need to be produced, it becomes apparent that each type of connected system will require its own set of rules and its own connected content that drives the true engaged experience.

As technologies advance, so does our perspective on content. As connectedness becomes part of our thinking, the advancement of content and engagement will excel to reach new heights of experience that lives on in the minds of the consumer longer and in more latent ways. It all begins with a display or an array of displays and is never ending with content.

Keith Kelsen is the author of "Unleashing the Power of Digital Signage – Content Strategies for the 5th Screen." More information about the book and the book's companion Web site can be found atwww.5thscreen.info.