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Digital signage making smart transportation smarter

Gone are the days of paper signs and delays in getting updated information out to travelers. We live in a real-time world, and travelers expect real-time, relevant information at their fingertips.

September 24, 2015

Gone are the days of paper signs and delays in getting updated information out to travelers. We live in a real-time world, and travelers expect real-time, relevant information at their fingertips. Visual communications, using devices such as digital signs and interactive kiosks, can enhance the passenger travel experience by helping people get to where they need to go safely, efficiently and effectively. Equipping your passengers with the right information, at the right time can ensure a positive experience in an environment that demands real-time sensitive information.

Visual communications in transportation can:

• Alleviate perceived wait times;
• Enhance travel experiences;
• Engage passengers with news, weather, emergency broadcasts;
• Deliver real-time location-based information, such as arrival/departure times, cancellations and delays, or service stoppage;
• Improve operations by reducing the workload of employees;
• Keep passengers safe; emergency notifications can interrupt regularly scheduled content; or
• Be a "travel guide" through interactive wayfinding kiosks.

Wayfinding has evolved over the last couple of decades from static paper signage to electronic wayfinding to interactive wayfinding. This transition in large part has been the result of new technologies becoming available for airports, stations and terminals to leverage. One technology that had a significant impact was digital signage. With digital signs, transportation organizations were able to quickly and easily update signage providing travelers with more accurate and timely arrival/departure times, cancellations and delays. The advent of digital signage also has led to significant improvements in wayfinding in facilities such as airports, where there are often multiple terminals and where large volumes of people need to be moved through the space quickly.

In airports, wayfinding encompasses a number of areas including moving travelers across terminals, to and from gates, through security and to popular destinations in the airport such as restaurants and shops. These same screens also are often used to provide not only wayfinding information but also for advertising and to provide news and weather updates.

Interactive wayfinding takes traditional wayfinding to an entirely new level integrating technologies such as touchscreens, RFID and barcode scanners. Touchscreens have enabled a whole new level of self-service, allowing travelers to independently select a destination from a map or list and have the system create a map to the endpoint, factoring in things such as multiple floors, multiple regions and multiple buildings. Additionally, some software solutions that power interactive wayfinding kiosks use conditional formatting and are able to react to things such as elevator operation times or conditions, making the system choose an appropriate route based on current conditions.

Digital signage and kiosk technologies have created intelligent, interactive ways of making smart travel even smarter.

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Omnivex digital signage software enables organizations to collect, present, and share information in real-time, on any screen.

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