Pervasive.TV

Digital Signage Expo 2008: Business Models plus IT, IP and TV

At the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas last week, the business models were far more interesting than most of the technologies on display. Everybody uses commodity information technologies, Internet Protocol networks and LCD or plasma flat panel displays. But the businesses they build around these common tools are in turn interesting, exciting, confusing or just a bit nutty. This week, I'll be reporting on the digital signage companies I visited, the conference sessions I attended and the smart people I talked to at the show. (Subscribe at the top of the next column to get the updates.) To a number of us, it seems a bit like the Internet in 1996: a few seasoned pioneers, a lot of sketchy upstarts, and a handful of big companies like Cisco staking out early acreage before the rush. Stay tuned.

Retail Floor TV Examples

At the Total Retail Experience (TREX) show in New York last month, I shot some clips of "floor TV", interactive video projected onto the floor that interacts with the people walking over it. About half the exhibits at the retail show employed some sort of shelf TV, digital signage or point-of-purchase television. The other half were mannequins, vinyl signs, hanging systems and corrugated displays.

This example of video as an architectural element transcends the advertising messages. The software called GroundFX is designed by Sunnyvale, CA-based Gesturetek. (Forgive the focus; I shot these with a Panasonic D-SNAP.)

Wearable Video: Philips Lumalive Launches at IFA

Here's the kind of environmental video we described in Five Platforms. At the IFA show in Germany this month, Philips demonstrated Lumalive, colored LEDs embedded in textiles made into T-shirts, jackets and sofa coverings. It's very low res since the light has to shine through a layer of fabric, and for wearable apps the control circuitry and battery have to be minimal to save weight. There's probably not enough power for real-time updates over WiFi or 3G networks, although on-board storage and a Bluetooth link to a mobile phone gateway wouldn't be too hard to image.

Philips is looking for partners to commercialize the product, and inevitably the company's press packet touts the "dynamic advertising" possibilities. But it would be nice to think that today's digital youth would think up some more personal and creative applications.

Super Bowl Augmented Reality

I went to a Giants football game at Meadowlands Stadium this season, a guest at a luxury sky box on the 50 yard line. Outside on the field. a live football game was happening in real time; inside, in the dark windowless lobby of the sky box tier, dozens of fans were plopped in front of big screen TVs watching the network coverage of the game. For these viewers, the regular reality on the field couldn't compete with the enhanced reality on television with its expert commentators, up-close camera work, instant replays and virtual field markers.

Introduced by ESPN in 1998, the Emmy-award winning 1st & Ten yellow first down marker from SportVision is a standard part of televised football games. It's companions, a blue line-of-scrimmage marker and a red safe kick marker, are more recent introductions. The virtual lines seem to be painted or chalked onto the turf, behind players and underfoot, and they move as the game proceeds. (An excellent description of the technology and the process appears in HowStuffWorks including a link to a Stanford lecture by developer Stan Honey.)

Augmented reality -- adding data to video -- is very popular with sports viewers hungry for real time information. SportVision also draws graphics and stats onto fields and rinks, follows race cars around the track with live spec balloons, and replaces field-side painted advertising billboards with digital virtual signs sold separately for broadcast.

We've always known that what we see on television is not real, but for generations trained in video game environments the latest augmented developments provide a world that's better than real.