This article is provided by and reproduced courtesy of Ryan Cahoy at Rise Vision.

As users have grown to love their hand-held interactive devices, current market conditions and engaging applications have poised digital signage for an interactive future.

By Ryan Cahoy

Digital signage has become an important medium for communication, with installations in retail outlets, businesses, hospitals, campuses and government facilities all over the world. While consumers have embraced the signage, the next step in the industry’s growth is to provide the same type of interactive experience that users have with their touch-screen-enabled hand-held devices.

Interactive digital signage is a natural for locations that feature numerous visitors who are unfamiliar with the setting. Some examples include hospitals, which often feature complex traffic patterns; college and universities, which contain numerous buildings; and casinos and hotels, which need to steer large numbers of guests toward amenities and conference/meeting room locations.

Following are three ways that companies can benefit from interactive digital signage.

• Interactive Wayfinding. Companies with large buildings or campuses can be difficult for visitors to navigate, leaving company receptionists and security guards to direct traffic. A touch-enabled digital sign can improve visitors’ experiences, while freeing personnel to focus on other tasks.

Interactive wayfinding systems offer significant improvements over traditional maps. Companies can link event schedules to a mapped location, or link directories of people and departments to a specific location. Zoom-in/zoom-out views offer a higher level of detail, improving navigation. And users can use interactive directories to find specific amenities, such as on-premise restaurants or other services.

In addition to improving everyday navigation, interactive signage also enables companies to react to disruptions such as construction by easily re-routing traffic. Companies also can plot each end-point independently, which redraws all routes automatically if a display is moved.

• Interactive Concierge. While every visitor benefits from the “personal touch,” it’s challenging to provide services around the clock. A touch-screen display can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to help your visitors find what they want, when they want it, with the simple swipe of a finger.

Even when staff is on duty, interactive concierge systems enable companies to post event schedules, point visitors to key amenities and services, and to categorize and organize large volumes of information to be presented on demand. Viewers can navigate and search simply by touching the display. Companies can even use the technology to provide coupons, announce specials and list promotions.

• Interactive Donor Walls. Many hospitals and universities rely on generous donors and patrons for funds, and corporations like to recognize employee achievement — interactive signage is a unique way to show appreciation. Interactive donor walls enable viewers to interact with and search for people who have been recognized.

Viewers can go beyond looking at names and pictures and link to biographies and other donation information. Corporations and entities can display an unlimited number of donor profiles, and enable viewers to navigate and search all of this information by simply touching the display. For special recognition to top donors or achievers, companies can create a “featured donor” section on the display, including text that explains the reasons behind a donation, and a picture of what the donation went towards.

Practical Considerations for Interactive Signage

Before investing in an interactive signage display, companies must consider three factors: durability, cost and return on investment.

• Durability: Unlike traditional digital signage, interactive displays are designed to be touched, and users will poke and prod at them multiple times within a day. The good news is, today’s commercial-grade products are designed to be rugged enough to withstand this use. Protective features such as screen coverings offer more durability, and some products work even in harsh weather conditions, enabling, for example, skiers to wayfind even while wearing gloves.

• Cost: Costs for touch-screen and other interactive signage products have come down substantially within the past year, lessening the gap between traditional and interactive signage. While they still are more expensive, customer expectations will drive demand for interactivity — and prices will continue to drop.

• ROI: With traditional signage, companies estimate traffic count and make assumptions on how many people viewed their message. With interactive signage, companies can run reports on how many people touch any individual item, making it far easier to measure. For example, with interactive signage, a mall can track how many people searched for a specific store. While most companies factor return on investment in purchasing decisions, a smarter approach is to measure their return on objective. Companies must determine what they want to achieve with their interactive display. Some goals include boosting employee productivity by reducing time spent providing directions, improving visitors’ experience by offering in-depth, around-the-clock information, and attracting more visitors to specific amenities and services, such as restaurants and shops. With specific objectives in mind, it is easier to evaluate the investment.

Interactive signage offers numerous opportunities for companies to improve their connection with visitors and customers, and to streamline their ability to provide helpful information. With hand-held devices leading the way, consumers will become more facile with touch-screen technology, and start to expect it in every environment. Now is a great time to evaluate interactive digital signage installations for your business.

Ryan Cahoy is Managing Director of Rise Holdings, the parent company of Rise Vision, a provider of SaaS-based digital signage software, and Rise Display, a system integrator for interactive displays, LED tickers and video wall technology. Ryan will be moderating the seminar “Trends in Interactive Gestural and Touch Screen Applications” at DSE 2010.

When you plug your laptop into a projector how does it know which resolutions to allow you to select?  You’ll often see that the slider in the display properties page changes the available resolutions to use when plugged into a projector.  When you connect your laptop to a display, a small package of information is handed off from the display/projector to the computer’s video card.  This package is called EDID, or Extended display identification data.  Essentially, it lets the video card know what kind of display it is, who makes it, what resolution is its “favorite,” that is, the native resolution, the list of other resolutions it supports, etc.  Your video card then updates the available resolutions you can choose from and output.

This usually works great at your desk, however, in a presentation room, classroom or auditorium where there may be numerous splitters, switchers, and video extenders between your laptop and the display, this information can get lost, or even “hijacked” by a component.

This can cause issues like:

• Their laptop image is blurry on the projector.
• Black borders show up around the image and it’s too small on the big screen
• The image looks crummy on their local screen.
• The user is left to guess at what the resolution of the projector is supposed to be.  Unless they are an A/V engineer, I doubt they’ll know the native resolution of each projector model out there!
• Or worst of all, their laptop may not have a compatible resolution.  Then the A/V support team gets a call and the presentation grinds to a halt.

Most users won’t understand why these problems are happening and will just get frustrated with the system that’s “broken”.

Potential gottchas include:

• Virtually all systems that send video over Cat5 cable block EDID information.
• These same video extenders often reinsert their own table of supported resolutions, and guess what… they might not match the resolutions of your display!  A major headache.
• Often, video splitters (aka distribution amplifiers) only pass back the EDID from the display hooked up to output #1.  Usually, this is not explained in the documentation.

So what can you do?

Software solutions exist.  If you control the pool of laptops you can load software on the system that unlocks extra resolutions for your projectors.  Still, this means the users has to know what they are doing, plus there are licensing costs for this software on each PC.  One such example is from EnTech and is called PowerStrip (http://entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm).  It is very powerful, but not very easy to use.

In my opinion, this is a hardware problem and not surprisingly, hardware solutions are the better answer.  DVN often uses EDID emulators to restore the EDID information so that it is handed off to the laptop properly.  One of our favorites switching and video distribution companies, Kramer Electronics, makes just such a product.  They are available for both DVI and VGA connections.  You’ll probably find that VGA is still the most common connection that laptop users utilize so I recommend tackling this first.

They are a snap to use when compared to deploying software on dozens of laptops:

1)      Hook EDID emulator box up directly to projector or display using a short VGA or DVI cable (make sure nothing is between unit and projector)

2)      Plug in power and put it in “capture” mode

3)      Allow unit to capture the EDID information and store it internally

4)      Replug the unit in as the first component that the laptop sees on the route to your projector.

Hardware EDID “problem fixers” are typically more affordable than software solutions since one device works for all laptops that will be used within the room.

Many customers ask us if we have digital signage player software we can throw on an old PC they have lying around.  They may only want to show simple slides or video clips looped on a single display.  Their intentions are obvious and understandable: to make their budget dollars stretch further.

While PCs are powerful and flexible, many people don’t realize they need proper preparation to be used for signage.  All the non-essential software must be stripped out, virus scanners removed, auto updaters killed, etc.  The process of making an old PC reliable for use as a digital signage PC usually takes a couple of hours.  Further, in the long run, using a PC for simple signage needs is not economical or “green”.  PCs can eat 50W-100W when running presentations and a couple generation old PCs (such as Pentium 4 based units) tend to be less power efficient than modern units.  Add up the kilowatt hours used and your bargain, “free” PC is no longer making your budget stretch.

A similar solution is to use a DVD player running a disc that loops to accomplish a simple presentation.  This has its own drawbacks including mechanical failure of the DVD player, but more importantly is that quality of DVD is limited to a resolution of only 480p.

In the past year or two several dedicated media players have emerged at price points below PCs and while they are not a great choice for real time data, they might just do the trick for simple presentations that don’t need to be updated too frequently.

• Software is very easy to learn and use.  If you’ve made a playlist for your iPod, you can make a signage playlist in not time.
• Power usage is minimal, typically under 10W.
• Runs at the full resolution of the LCD Panel such as 1080p as opposed to a DVD at 480p.
• Reliable and purpose built.
• No software updates or pop-ups to interfere with your presentation.

Our favorite budget unit has:

• 2GB of storage, enough to store hours of pictures and video clips if properly compressed
• Supports nearly every video format under the sun
• HDMI output at 1080p
• Can have playlists uploaded via the LAN
• Can have playlists uploaded using a USB Stick

Once you see these benefits, it’s really a no brainer on selecting a dedicated media player.  Donate that old PC to a good cause and use a purpose-built hardware player.

In the early days of digital signage, we saw many home-crafted software solutions that were essentially little more than PowerPoint on steroids.  That was if they simply weren’t just running PowerPoint itself!  In most installations using this approach, the client would start off bright-eyed and excited to get content up on the screens.  The investment in the signage was usually an initiative of an individual or small group of people within a department who may or may not have ultimately been responsible for updating the screens. The screen would be installed, content would be uploaded, and someone often a student employee (in educational institutions) or administrative assistant (in corporate world) would be asked to keep them up to date.  The first round of content would go up, then maybe a few rounds of updates would be made over the first couple months, then those responsible for updating the systems would either move on or be reassigned.  Upon returning to the site, say, six months later, the same old tired content is still up on the screens!  A sad use of such a powerful tool.

While, as being a Digital Signage Provider, we are excited to design an excellent hardware platform even if the client budget is limited.  However, we try to insist on clients not taking the approach mentioned above.  Let’s face it, employees are busy and can’t always keep content up to date on the screens.

If you feel your department or team might fall into this trap, why not offload some of the content creation to other parties?  Leverage the tremendous amount of content that is being created out there every minute of every day by others.  Our solution has been to provide the client with a digital signage solution that includes dynamic, live data updates packaged as a service with the software.  News, weather, sports, financial data… all are available to be streamed live to your screens when they are connected to the internet.

One of our favorite solutions we offer packaged as service we call DVN Live.  It is powered using an industry leading backend called Rise Vision.  Minimal upfront costs, fully customizable, solid reliability, and best of all, nearly everything can run on “auto pilot”!

Some other benefits of “auto pilot” signage is that since there is always something fresh and interesting on your screens, it gives employees or others who frequent the building (not just guests) a reason to look at your screens.  If regular visitors get used to seeing the same screens (or infrequently updated content) they’ll soon be filtering out the existence of the screens.   With fresh content like news headlines and weather forecasts, they have a reason to look at them again each day as the walk by.  I can attest to this, as we have DVN Live running in our lobby and I look at new content every time I walk by.

So, make your life easier and put your signage on “auto pilot” with DVN Live.

Improving the Reliability of your Digital Signage When Using PowerPoint Content

Just about everyone who has an ounce of creative force in them knows how to create a PowerPoint file.  While it might not be the most powerful way to create high quality slides for your digital signage, it certainly has a couple of great things going for it: accessibility and approachability. However, you should think about converting those PowerPoint files to boost reliability of your signage.

Nearly everyone has PowerPoint installed on their computers as part of the Microsoft Office package plus most people have used it making the learning curve smaller to create slides and announcements for your digital signage.

Our experience has shown that there are several reasons PowerPoint is not very well suited for digital signage however:

• First, to keep the cost of players down, you would likely want to go with the PowerPoint viewer rather than a full copy of Office.  Problem is, the PowerPoint view only plays presentations in full screen mode.  Not a very good solution for signage with multiple zones within the layout.
• Secondly, PowerPoint is a resource hog and can crash or experience memory leaks when run 24/7.  Your system needs to be more reliable than that.

One solution we recommend is to convert your PowerPoint files to Flash SWF files.  Flash files are like movie clips and they will essentially capture all the animations and transitions from your presentation.  They are smaller in size and will play more reliability than a full PowerPoint file.

We have tested a couple of free converters but the results aren’t typically very good.  Two we have tested that are good are iSpring Pro and AuthorPoint.  Both are great for converting, and have tons of options.

iSpring Pro has an academic license version for you folks in K-12 or Higher Ed you can view here:   http://www.ispringsolutions.com/purchase/academic_license_request.html

For more information on the product, http://www.ispringsolutions.com/index.html?ad=adw&kwid=1fheva2nmb&gclid=CP6wycmZkJwCFRHxDAodxFXqYA“>click here.

authorPoint also has a “Lite” edition that’s worth trying to see if it fits your needs.  Check out the comparison here:  http://www.authorgen.com/authorpoint/compare.aspx