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.