Fight the future

Virtually all sci-fi movies that provide glimpses of our future show us high-reaching cityscapes adorned with massive electronic advertisements. Ironically, the very community producing these overly cyan cinema versions of our future are the very sources of legislative attempts to prevent us from reaching our inevitable urban image.
Here in the recent past, California lawmakers have been grappling with AB109, the bill that would have limited digital sign proliferation throughout California. But they are not alone! As long ago as 2002, Jack "dusty fax machine" Weiss, a LA City Council Member, demanded annual billboard-inspection fees levied against billboard owners. Meanwhile his colleague Cindy "future fighter"Miscikowski attempted to ban all new electronic billboards. Last year Eric Garcetti pushed to get the city to revisit their agreement with Clear Channel that allowed them to supply Los Angeles with future friendly electronic billboards in place of their existing static billboards. Currently the city council is considering limiting these future perfect appliances to specific advertising corridors, which may unfairly provide the future disproportionately to the lucky few in those areas.

But who will watch the Watchmen... Poster?

Digital Signage is inherently connected to the internet, which means it could relate marketing data exceptionally well, and two technology providers, Trumedia, and Quividi are offering very unique products that can can count the number of people who are watching. and even determine some of the specifics of what type of person it is. For all of the Orwellian alarmists out there, both of these systems do not collect images of faces, or any specific personal information, and only transmit marketing data back to the mothership such as total number of viewers, age, gender, and time engaged, which makes the technology less obtrusive than phone id, or the barcode-on-forehead method.

Human eyes are roughly 13cm apart, without that much variation. And, all of our eyes are in pretty much the same place with regard to our noses and mouths, and the shape of our heads. So computers can pretty much see our faces, and in this case, the computer can tell when a face is looking in the desired direction. All of the analysis is done locally, so there is no need to transmit video images beyond the CPU housed in the digital sign, which safeguards privacy concerns, and lightens the networking load for the data collection. The images you see here are proof of concept demonstrations, allowing you to see what the analysis software sees. From there the computer decides, on its own, when and how to best take over the entire human race.

Digital posters on the rise

Alive, part of CBS Outdoor's plan to kick everybody's ass, populates London's already well populated tube escalators with refreshing, and creative visuals. Based on the platform of the Digital Escalator Panels which are now in their fourth year of entertaining commuters.
The most exciting media on the DEPs spans action from panel to panel creating the sensation of the panels actually being windows onto another reality, a reality that is, perhaps, more exciting than Tottenham Court Road station.

The 23” screens made by Zytronic for Esprit communations are designed to deliver an extremely robust, fully laminated, anti-glare coated glass solution that could meet IP65 Section 12 requirements (whatever that is), they are ruggedised, vandal-resistant, sealed enclosures and had to undergo an extremely rigorous testing process which included a dust tunnel and hammer test; burning at 1,000°C for one hour without any emissions, and full submersion under water. So, whether you are drowned, burned, or hammered these screen will deliver entertainment to you, even if you find your self in a dust tunnel.

It's not just for the wall anymore

A new alternative to dimensionality for print media is Augmented Reality. Companies such as Social Animal and Total Immersion are developing products for Themed entertainment, and consumer applications. This technology holds spectacular implications for digital signage.
Signage incorporating AR could encourage users to use their phones to see additional messaging and provide geometrically more engagement per location, as well as even more marketing data, and even expanded commerce.
Augmented Reality is the Eponym for any media that integrates a computer generated image with a user's camera system. Mikko Haapoja is credited for translating the first English language user notes for Saqoosha's Japanese code for the Flash toolkit (which has been called FLART, or also FLIRT) and his blog remains one of the most substantial user bulletin boards for this medium.

The end of the beginning

Sony's salvo of digital signage for T4 Salvation tells a story of destruction, turning an ariel view of Los Angeles into the face of the Terminator complete with smoke and fire.

The digital poster, available with audio - as if you need it - are available on Sony's website.

This digital poster is a movie, but at its heart it's a lenticular*; it's a poster which changes from one image to another, ideally forming a relationship or gesture between the two.

In the case of the T4 Poster, successfully telling the story of the film: war with robots!
http://www.sonypictures.net/movies/terminatorsalvation/poster.html

Lenticular images create the illusion of animation by printing different images beneath a surface that directs the viewer's vision to one image at a time depending on the angle that the surface is viewed from. For more information on linticulars check out IGH, World3d, or Learn About Movie Posters (which is a site, not a catty insult)

The first signs of intelligent life

In many markets across the United States conventional movie poster cases are being replaced by digital movie posters, and the content for these posters have been fairly scatter-shot until recently.

BLT, has created a few magnificent posters for their 20th Century Fox. The most formidable being their "Living One Sheet*" for Bride Wars. If you are up for a challenge, go to
http://www.bltomato.com/index_full.html
Below the "PRINT" tab at the bottom of the screen you can select "Living One Sheet*", and then select the poster, and finally see the poster in action.

Hathaway and Hudson pose back to back, as a static poster One Sheet*, and then abruptly start to push one another, then recover their poise, and the poster is once again static.
http://www.bridewars.com/

Another magnificent example of this technology is the Marley and Me poster. In this case the dog just sits there, wrapped in a red bow, and then abruptly looks around, and then fixes his puppy-gorgeous gaze back on the camera.

It's so subtle it's the sort of things only your daughter notices, and then she hauls you back to the poster case, and you wait for it to happen again, and tah-dah! It does, but your have to watch it seventeen more times just to see make sure the doggie is going to do the same thing every time. (It does)


* One Sheet: In case you are not in the movie advertisement business, a "one sheet" is just the industry term for Movie Poster. In printing terms there used to be Half Sheets, and then Billboards that were scaled in sheets, such as 8-sheets and 30-sheets. A sheet has shifted over the past century but is around 27" x 40". A one sheet has also come to mean one image that culminates the central idea of the movie, and that meaning has spread to everything under the sun.