Pervasive Displays: Understanding the Future of Digital Signage (Synthesis Lectures on Mobile & Pervasive Computing)

Fueled by falling display hardware costs and rising demand, digital signage and pervasive displays are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Such systems have traditionally been used for advertising and information dissemination, with digital signage commonplace in shopping malls, airports and public spaces. While advertising and broadcasting announcements remain important applications, developments in sensing and interaction technologies are enabling entirely new classes of display applications that tailor content to the situation and audience of the display. As a result, signage systems are beginning to transition from simple broadcast systems to rich platforms for communication and interaction. In this lecture, we provide an introduction to this emerging field for researchers and practitioners interested in creating state-of-the-art pervasive display systems. We begin by describing the history of pervasive display research, providing illustrations of key systems, from pioneering work on supporting collaboration to contemporary systems designed for personalized information delivery. We then consider what the near future might hold for display networks -- describing a series of compelling applications that are being postulated for future display networks. Creating such systems raises a wide range of challenges and requires designers to make a series of important trade-offs. We dedicate four chapters to key aspects of pervasive display design: audience engagement, display interaction, system software, and system evaluation. These chapters provide an overview of current thinking in each area. Finally, we present a series of case studies of display systems and our concluding remarks.

Nigel Davies is a Professor in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University and is currently a visiting faculty member at CMU. His research focuses on experimental mobile and ubiquitous systems and his projects include the MOST, GUIDE and e-Campus projects that have been widely reported on in the academic literature and the popular press. Professor Davies has held visiting positions at SICS, Sony's Distributed Systems Lab in San Jose, the Bonn Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich and Google Research in Mountain View, CA. Nigel is active in the research community and has co-chaired both Ubicomp and MobiSys conferences. He is currently editor-in-chief of IEEE PervasiveMagazine, chair of the steering committee for Hot-Mobile and one of the founders of the ACM PerDis Symposium on Pervasive Displays. From 2010 to 2013 he was the coordinator of PD-NET, a large multinational project that aimed to lay the scientific foundations for the next generation of open pervasive display networks. Sarah Clinch is a PhD researcher at Lancaster University, UK, where she works on supporting applications and personalization in pervasive display systems. In 2009 she was a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University where she conducted research on cloudlet computing and the use of virtualization techniques for public displays. Sarah also worked on the PD-NET project for future display networks in collaboration with the University of Stuttgart, the University of Minho and the University of Lugano. She has published extensively in the field and is a co-creator of the Yarely digital signage software system that is in daily use at Lancaster. Sarah has served as the publicity chair for PerDis 2012 and is the Web Chair for Ubicomp 2014. Florian Alt is an Assistant Professor in the Group for Media Informatics at the University of Munich, Germany. His research interest is on pervasive advertising and on implicit and explicit interaction with public displays. Particularly helooks at how to entice people to interact and investigates the cognitive effects of interaction. Florian's research projects include Digifieds, a digital public notice area that allowed users' expectations and suitable interaction techniques to be evaluated, and Looking Glass, an interactive gesture-based display application investigating how interactivity can be communicated to passersby. His research has been published in leading HCI venues and journals (SIGCHI, ToCHI) and he is a co-editor of the book Pervasive Advertising that appeared in the Springer HCI Series in 2011. Prior to his appointment in Munich, Florian worked as a research associate at the University of Stuttgart and as a visiting researcher at Telekom Innovation Labs in Berlin. He holds a diploma in media informatics from the University of Munich and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Stuttgart.