Digital Signage Expo Wrap Up- Las Vegas
So, this week Michael Ong and I took a journey to Las Vegas for exposure on new mediums for experiential content. We thought it would be great to start at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas! We saw some fantastic displays, and some interesting new trends in digital signage. Here are a couple of the main trends that we saw.
Transparent Displays
Having displays blend into the environment appears to be quite an achievement. We saw a lot of transparent touch screens, still in conceptual development. Yet, I was surprised to see that these were all achieved using projectors, instead of some sort of transparent LCD screen. In fact, there was even a product called Goo that could be applied to any surface to make it projector friendly! Perhaps the technology isn’t quite to the point it needs to be, but still the effect is pretty intriguing. This could be quite fantastic in retail environments, where the display could be integrated with a pane of glass, turning on and off when necessary.
Interactive Surfaces
I was quite impressed with the companies that were pushing new interactive surfaces. GestureTek was adept at making table and floor based turnkey systems. They have also developed a neat input device that allows you to control a cursor using hand gestures.
Face Tracking
Yes, face tracking is in. A lot of the displays that we saw had a camera integrated into them that could detect information about the viewer demographic. In other words, it could detect your race, gender and approximate age. A bit creepy if you are skeptical with what they’re doing with the information. But, they claim that it’s a form of anonymous analysis. The systems are very intuitive and that was pretty cool to see. For example, in some cases, the interface would shift down depending on the height of the individual looking at it. Or, if it was a female viewing the screen, it would show a makeup ad and then switch to a shaving ad if it was a male viewing the screen.
All in all, the show was amazing. We learned a lot, came back with some new ideas and lots of inspiration.
