Follow the flow

We saw a lot of digital signage applications  but Digigage has enchanted us with their products. The WinGage Elevetor product, makes the use of an elevator,fun as in a game. What does it do? Nothing except using  a 3D animated live content world, which senses the elevator vertical movement and reacts in real time adapting the virtual world point of view and/or behavior to the actual elevator movement. How? Just watch the video

They also utilize the horizontal movement as a very good promo for Coke in Israel. The bubbles follow the movement of the bus, and when it stops a Coke bottle is forming. A nice way to travel in a route that has become a routine.

Last but not least we kept a video which shows another way of promoting products. A digital signage “Video game”. Enjoy it.

Nice work guys

Multitoe floor

Are you fed up with multi-touch screens? How about multitoe floor?  An entire floor to practice your foot-based inputs on?

Researchers at Potsdam’s, Germany, Hasso Plattner Institut have put together a multitouch floor that recognizes individual users by their shoe pattern and responds to such universally familiar actions as stomping your feet and tapping your toes.

We based our design on frustrated total internal reflection because its ability to sense pressure allows the device to see users’ soles when applied to a floor. We demonstrate how this allows us to recognize foot postures and to identify users. These two functions form the basis of our system. They allow the floor to ignore inactive users, identify and track users based on their shoes, enable high-precision interaction, invoke menus, as well as track heads and allow users to control several multiple degrees of freedom by balancing their feet.

I think that the time that the stores would begin their ads by “reading” our toes is not far away. Digital Signage at your toes.

So stop typing and start tapping

via Engadget

When sex is implied. big screens are obsolete

A very clever campaign from the Lowe Ginkgo Agency in Montevideo, Uruguay. In order to promote New Axe Day & Night they advertised in Magazines the above photo with the blank areas and asked everyone who wanted to see the “big picture” to send an sms  writing Axe to 2345 after 9pm. Then they got back the missing part of the picture and they could complete the image.

Simple brilliant

via Direct Daily

San Francisco moves on

Sometime ago I saw an interesting article about the new 360 Muni bus stop that the city of San Francisco  plans to build by  2013.

The stops, which should cost around $30,000, may seem expensive, but they’ll be pretty energy-efficient. The energy not used by the stops will be fed into the city’s power grid, and the stops themselves will use LED lighting, nearly four and a half times more efficient than the current fluorescent.

Now I saw also in You tube the advertising concept of the Installation, by Clear Channel. It’s simple and it’s brilliant. That’ why they earned another 20 bus stop from SF Municipality.

Wall of fun

Ok, It’s summer, summer in Greece, we are on vacation, but still there are amazing installations that we have to present them to you.

This one  consists out of 35,000 LED bulb installation and  is now installed permanently at La Vitrine Culturelle and can be seen every evening from 7 to 11 (145, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montréal). The company who did it is Moment Factory and you can see how it looks in the next video.

(via Urban Prankster)

Biometrics in Digital Signage

Since I first saw “Minority report” I was dreaming the day that this would happen. Iris  scan and the triggering of  a Digital Signage system, producing an ad for me. Ok this is Science fiction, not because of the technologie but in respect of  the personal data involved, or at least I thought tha this was a problem.

Hitachi developed a venting machine where you pay by using your veins.

Hitachi’s proprietary biometric authentication system requires that users first register an account (probably linking their vein pattern to a credit card), but it allows one to purchase, say, a delicious can of green tea or icy cold black coffee by inserting a cautious hand into a machine for a quick scan.

Of course, the system exploits your identity a bit in the process, using age and gender information on file to display an appropriate video ad while you enjoy your refreshment.

I know that japanese people are very sensitive with their personal data, but I can’t understand how Hitachi’s product will satisfy advertisers and the need of not exploiting customers personal data.

MSN News via CrunchGear via Gizmodo

Twitter in Digital Signage

The well known 140 character micro blogging platform, will become part of a digital signage system, through an Industry weapon implementation. As they say :

We recently received a call from one of our partners with a request to integrate CommandCenterHD with their customer’s Twitter account. This would allow the customer to dynamically change their digital signage based on Twitter messaging.

So we have a conjuction between social media and another aspect of non-mainstream media, digital signage. Now it’s facebook‘s turn to be incorporated in a DS sytem.

Taxis from the past

Watching my old “wired” issues I saw an article from December 2004, about digital signage in taxis in New York and San Francisco, but also some other new technologies applied in taxis.

Seeing this, 5 years later and watching the Greek taxi’s, I can understand why people in Greece are thinking that we are still a decade back from whatever happens to USA, maybe more.

Today ads in Greek taxis consists only in printed form behind the drivers and co-drivers seats and as a “wrap”  in taxi doors.

So the market prefers a way that is not productive for no one. Until when?