And the gaming sector has long been among the most eclectic users of display technology, both for communicating with customers and for enhancing the gaming experience.

It’s likely that the next wave of innovation will come with touch-enabled devices, whether these are handheld systems or larger screens capable of registering multiple simultaneous touches. (The next wave but one will probably be 3D, but it’s a few years away from widespread rollouts in the real world, and producing effective 3D without special glasses is still a tall order.)

Screen vendor General Touch, for example, noticed this trend at ELA, the Latin American gaming exhibition held in Mexico City in May. “The response from the market [to touchscreens] has been excellent. The rapid transition to Class III machines indicates the market is looking for the highest quality LCD touch monitors,” said a spokeswoman.

Touch capability is nothing new, of course, as any gamer can tell you. What is new – or least about to become a whole lot more widespread – is so-called “multi-touch”. Enabling the software that drives the screen to interpret numerous touches at the same time opens up a range of new possibilities: for example, more sophisticated interfaces allowing the user to virtually manipulate objects on the screen, or letting two or more users interact with the screen simultaneously.

Says 3M, a pioneer in multi-touch: “Utilising this new technology, software developers are able to initiate a technological leap in the way users interact with all types of information and to expand traditional touch interaction to include multiple users and increase collaboration.” Its products include 22-inch multi-touch displays that can sense up to ten finger touches at a time – a leap ahead of older systems that were limited to two simultaneous touches.

The iPhone effect

Multi-touch will be made a common reality by the happy coincidence of three factors. First, the popularity of the Apple iPhone and other touchscreen-based smartphones means that a set of informal standards for using fingers on the screen is emerging – for example, enlarging an image by dragging two fingers apart across it. Second, the arrival of smartphones also means consumers are becoming more accustomed to touch interfaces, and will master them more quickly: dragging those fingers is rapidly becoming second nature to many technology-savvy consumers.

And third, Microsoft’s Windows 7 – released late last year – is the first version of the market-leading operating system to support multi-touch (although previous versions supported single-touch interfaces). That alone will mean a dramatic increase in the number of touch-based applications, further increasing familiarity and confidence – and even leading, perhaps, to a growing expectation that when you see something on a screen, you can use your hands to engage with it.

Confirms Ian Crosby, Sales and Marketing Director of touchscreen maker Zytronics: “As user interface design advances in the wake of the iPhone phenomenon, consumer demand for much more advanced touch capabilities such as gesture recognition, multi-touch detection, and ever faster touch response is growing. This in turn is driving the need for better touch controller solutions which can support these new features in all form factors.”

However, not all gaming suppliers are approaching touch – whether single or multi – in the same way. A range of technologies exists, each well suited to certain applications and less ideal for others.

Suzo Happ, for example, is European distributor for Elo TouchSystems, an American firm which claims to be the world’s largest producer of touchscreens. Its units, ranging in size from 12 to 32 inches diagonally from corner to corner (as screen size is usually measured), employ different touch technologies: some use acoustic pulse recognition (APR), others in Elo’s IntelliTouch/SecureTouch vandal-resistant lines are based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) principles, while still others incorporate capacitive touchscreen technology. These all work in different ways to detect the user’s touch on the screen.

Says Suzo Happ’s spokesman John Carroll: “Acoustic pulse recognition is the latest newcomer in the market, and is available exclusively from Elo. This all-glass touch technology not only delivers image quality – as it is made of pure glass – but also allows players to hold their hands on the screen while playing. If it would be required to have, say, 20 people holding their hands on the screen while people would still be playing, that would be possible.

“Multi-touch capability has also been added to the surface acoustic wave technology – a proven technology in the gaming market,” Carroll adds. “The name is IntelliTouch Plus and this touch technology has met all the Additional Qualification (AQ) testing requirements established by Microsoft for Windows 7 multi-touch interactivity.”

Not all vendors are quite so bullish on the imminence of multi-touch applications, though. “Multi-touch is on its way,” agrees Polly Wiseman of casino product maker Eurocoin, “but due to being linked with Windows 7 technology it will be a slow introduction, it will be based on specific games – I doubt we will see anything for two years.”

Tough one

Whenever multi-touch goes mainstream, the secret of success in gaming businesses will not lie only in the design of the touch application. The gaming environment puts special demands on the hardware itself.

General Touch, for instance, produces a 22-inch touchscreen monitor aimed at gaming users – and some of its specifications illustrate the very different requirements of gaming machines and public information displays such as digital signage screens.

The viewing angle from which the screen can be seen adequately is only 89 degrees to the left and right (just half the theoretical maximum of 180 degrees), but that’s not an important deficiency, because where there’s only one person interacting with the screen, they will likely be standing right in front of it. A more significant feature is the 16ms response time (the rapidity with which the image can change) – fast response is essential for interactive applications.

The firm, which makes LCD touchscreens from 6.4 to 29 inches, also builds in water-proofing and dust-proofing. And indeed, one of the biggest issues for businesses installing any screen-based system is resistance to abuse – whether that’s just the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of hours of touching, or whether it’s deliberate vandalism. As Eurocoin’s Wiseman says, there’s a risk of “damage when people lose money – they tend to take it out on the display”.

Screen vendors, aware of the size of the gaming market, have taken steps to address such vulnerability. Says Suzo Happ’s Carroll: “Elo has touch solutions against this. For example, it passes the UL-60950 ball-drop test on the 1939L SecureTouch touchmonitor, using a half-kilo steel ball dropped from a height of 1.3 meters onto the touchscreen glass without breakage. Elo’s popular technologies for gaming have no issue with vandalism – they even work with deep scratches from diamonds.”

The final frontier

Another issue facing all screen deployments – whether interactive or not – is space, says Carroll. “There are space limitations and that’s why there are standard game cabinets today. The trend for standard slots is now towards [screen sizes of] 22 inches. Larger, however, could be an issue.

“There is in fact a theoretical maximum size for a display for a single user. If the screen is too big the player can’t see the periphery of the screen without moving his head from left to right. If the screen is really big, the players have to even step away from the screen to see the screen, and then move forward to the screen to touch it, which would really be an issue.”

He adds: “Larger screens are looked at primarily for multi-touch applications but there you have to determine if player identification is necessary.”

Wiseman agrees that the 22-inch form factor, with screens in the common 16:9 ratio of width to height, remains the dominant one in gaming. But she adds that “slant-top machines are now moving to 26 inches”, in a slightly deeper 16:10 ratio. Among the most impressive installations she has recently seen, says Wiseman, is a 26-inch Novomatic slant-top – “the visual effect is amazing”. And of course screens for information and digital signage can be much larger, although often they do have to be squeezed into tight locations.

One vendor rising to the challenge of putting interactive screens in constricted spaces is IGEL Technology. Its new UD9 is a “thin client” – a kind of stripped-down PC with built-in 21.5-inch LCD display, small enough to fit where a full-blown PC unit and accompanying screen wouldn’t. It runs on a fast but not power-hungry processor – a 1.6GHz Intel Atom chip – and can be given touchscreen and wireless network capabilities, as well as an integrated smartcard reader. It also comes with management software enabling multiple UD9 devices to be remotely managed from a single PC.

“This latest UD9 combines all IGEL’s thin client expertise into a specialised all-in-one package,” says Simon Richards, IGEL’s UK General Manager. “With its robust, ergonomic design and simplicity of management it is the ideal device for a range of public-facing and space-constrained environments.”

At the other end of the scale, Zytronics is championing the cause of super-sized touchscreens measuring up to 80 inches diagonally. Based on projected capacitive technology, they’ve been adopted by a number of other vendors for customer-facing applications: for example, Advantech and Wincomm are both using them for interactive digital-signage stations.

They’re an interesting product category for gaming businesses because the projective capacitance technology is especially suited to withstanding harsh treatment. Unlike some touchscreen systems, it doesn’t require that the touch-sensitive elements are directly exposed to the user; they can be behind a protective layer. Zytronics’s screens have, the company says, “even been used to create interactive self-service tabletops, operating through printed and toughened glass overlays”.

Feel the quality

Size and touch capability aren’t the only important factors in assessing screens’ contribution to gaming, points out Inspired Gaming Group’s Lucy Buckley: “We believe it’s no longer just about touchscreens – the quality of the screen is the most crucial part of a player’s gaming experience. A year in the making, we’re really excited about our new Storm cabinet, with its high- definition [HD] TV quality and adjustable live feed. It’s already a success in the UK’s largest bookmaker, William Hill, and we are bringing HD gaming VLT technology to the Italian gaming market for the first time through our deal with Sisal.”

Martin Lucas, MD of Inspired’s licensed betting office (LBO) division, adds: “The Storm cabinet is truly revolutionary with its wide screen and HD capability. With Storm we are creating a new standard for HD gaming on the high street and a new benchmark for player enjoyment and machine income.”

Image quality is, of course, also key when it comes to non-gaming applications like digital signage. At this year’s Screen Media Expo Europe event in London, for example, Display Technology debuted a 43-inch ultra-wide screen in a 4:1 ratio, which can be used in portrait or landscape format. A 178-degree viewing angle – very close to the theoretical maximum of 180 degrees – combined with 1920x480 resolution means that the on-screen action should be seen clearly by everyone in a crowd gathered around the unit.

The quality bar is constantly being raised. Panasonic, one of the few major display vendors remaining committed to plasma technology while most others – firms like BenQ, Hitachi, Samsung and Sharp – have cast their lot with LCD, recently launched the first models in its 20 Series.

These plasma screens use the firm’s NeoPDP technology, delivering more brightness for less power, while Panasonic’s built-in Nanodrift system is a technique for preventing “image retention” – the familiar curse of screens that show the same image for much of the time and end up with it permanently etched into the display, its outline appearing even when other content should be on-screen. Nanodrift works by constantly and very subtly – invisibly to viewers – changing the displayed image so that it doesn’t have a chance to burn in.

Says Enrique Robledo, Panasonic’s Display Marketing Manager in Europe: “The 20 series meets the industry demand for high-definition screens that are flexible and light”. The astonishingly high contrast ratio of up to 5,000,000:1 (that’s the ratio of the brightest bright to the darkest dark) and high-quality colour will make them suitable for signage-type applications in bright environments such as lobbies, and Panasonic’s point that the screens are also large enough for “life-size upper-body viewing” suggests they could find some intriguing applications in gaming. For example, geographically separated players could compete head-to-head and see each other full-size on the screen.

Would that display be touchable? Maybe, maybe not: while it’s certain that reaching out to stroke a screen will become an increasingly commonplace part of gaming, and indeed of everyday life, there will likely always be situations where there are better methods for the player to manipulate the game, for example using a joystick or body movements, as with the Nintendo Wii.

But what is also certain is that the amusement and gaming businesses of the future will be dominated by screens large and small, 2D and 3D, all engaging the customer in ways that keep them playing longer and happier, and coming back sooner.

Getting started with digital signage

Leisure venues such as arcades and amusement centres are near-perfect sites for digital signage – their visitors generally stay for a substantial amount of time, can benefit from information (whether it's related to the game they're playing, the ones they haven't tried yet, or other activities), and have money to spend. Plus, especially if they're slot players, they're by definition already very accustomed to interacting with visual displays.

But before specifying and rolling out digital signage – whether or not it's interactive – it's important to distinguish among the different types of screen network. The business purpose, the technology features, and the scale of the eventual deployment are all factors that should drive the final purchase decision.

Technology vendor Gaming Support, for example, divides its digital signage offering into three levels: promotion of individual banks of slots, digital marketing across an entire venue, and multi-venue broadcasting.

For small slot installations, the firm offers JackpotJunction Lite, which comprises a media controller and two pieces of software – Video Junction and Jackpot Data Exchange. The system supports audio as well as moving video, and can be integrated with progressive jackpot displays.

To serve larger venues, JackpotJunction Pro is based on an enhanced suite of software tools. Unlike the Lite version, this can be used to manage multiple different zones of screens, with the displays in each showing different content.

Operators of multiple venues, meanwhile, can opt for JackpotJunction XL, which combines technology from Alpha Video and digital signage software specialist Scala with Gaming Support's own. The firm calls it “the world’s only wide-area gaming-enabled digital signage system”, and as far as we're aware that's a fair assessment.

Next steps

Venues considering a digital signage network may well find that, given the number of variables involved, the best way to proceed is a formal Request for Proposals, allowing potential vendors to describe how they can meet the project’s requirements.

But before going to this stage it’s worth making informal contact with as many suppliers as possible to get a feel for norms and trends in terms of features and operations. And indeed, businesses with less ambitious plans may find that this approach leads them straight to a workable solution.

We'll be exploring the potential – and the challenges – of digital signage in more detail in Euroslot soon.

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