Screens of one kind or another already dominate amusement businesses, of course, as the intermediary between consumer and game. But there’s increasing interest in another application of screens, known by a slew of names including digital out-of-home (DOOH), place-based media, digital signage (a little misleading), and in-store TV.

What all these describe is, at heart, the use of screens to deliver to the consumer information that is particular to the place, and usually fine-tuned to meet the immediate needs of both the audience and the venue: for example, by promoting different aspects of the offer at relevant times of day and year. Winter-morning customers will be receptive to cappuccino, on summer afternoons they could prefer a cold beer; word-game SWPs might be more popular at quieter times; sports betting will grow in appeal even to infrequent gamblers when there’s a big international tournament on.

You can see this medium, then, as simply a more powerful version of a poster, capable of moving video and sound, and much more easily updated – even remotely across hundreds of screens in a large chain operation.

But we’re still at the beginning of the digital out-of-home story; it’s only really made the transition from interesting niche to mainstream marketing and advertising application in the last half-decade or less. And we’re starting to see, now, that it has the potential to provide a lot more than a smarter poster.

Interaction via touchscreens and, in some cases, gestural interfaces (see box, Beyond the Touchscreen) is now commonplace, creating a spectrum of screens that ranges from non-interactive simple purveyors of information at the one extreme, to fully consumer-driven kiosks at the other. Successfully devising these is an order of magnitude more complex than just putting video on a screen, but some suppliers such as Elo TouchSystems have substantial experience in the gaming and amusements sector, and there are also many content-production companies specialising in interactive media; perhaps more than anywhere in the digital out-of-home world, this is an area where going it alone to save a few pounds is a very false economy.

The next step is integration with mobile handsets and social media. Comparatively clumsy connection between digital screens and mobiles, usually via Bluetooth, has been around for a while; what’s now captured the imagination of developers in this sector, however, is the possibility of making the out-of-home screen just one participant in a three-way dialogue that also includes the personal screen, on a smartphone, and the screen that’s shared with friends, via Facebook or similar services.

For amusement businesses, of course, a fourth screen can be added to that mix: the gaming device. How might this theory work in practice? Imagine a quiz SWP. A player logs into the machine using their mobile before the game begins. When they’re stuck on an early question with a relatively long time to respond, they hit an “ask friends” button on the machine. That posts the question to the public screens in the venue, along with SMS short codes for each of the possible answers; other players can vote on the correct response simply by texting that short code.

Meanwhile, it also posts the question to the player’s Facebook profile as their status, with the answer options each posted as a comment from the SWP’s own Facebook account. The player’s friends can use Facebook’s Like feature to select which answer they think is correct, and all the votes from both the venue-based screen and the social network are tallied and reported back to the player at the game.

This, of course, is just one hypothetical example of how place-based displays, handsets and social networks could be used as a media mix to enrich the consumer’s experience – and, the operator will hope, draw their friends too into playing that SWP one day.

Recognising customers

Other technologies are also creating new opportunities for the creative deployment of public-facing screens.

Facial-recognition systems, for example, can now make a reasonably good stab at estimating the age and gender of an individual watching a screen, and tailor content accordingly in real time (although it has to be added that there are persistently voiced privacy concerns here, and they’re unlikely to go away).

The software that drives digital out-of-home screens is increasingly cloud-based – in other words, it does its work over the Internet rather than having to run on a local PC. This makes it much easier to deploy screens in cramped conditions, by cutting down the amount of hardware that’s required.

On a larger scale, video walls which combine numerous screens into a single image are becoming popular with larger venues. Christie’s MicroTiles technology is an especially interesting one here, allowing designers to break free from the rectangular constraints of the conventional screen.

And 3D, brought into the limelight recently by its cinema revival, can also be used out-of-home, although truly effective glasses-free 3D is not yet with us – and cost-effective glasses-free 3D is probably even further away for most purposes.

The advertising option

Screens in public places are also used to directly generate revenue by showing advertising – indeed, our box headed Opening Time at Last reports on a large network that’s recently gone live in British pubs and bars. And there seems to be considerable scope for expansion here in the amusement and leisure sectors.

According to the Outdoor Media Centre, a trade body representing Britain’s out-of-home media owners, in the last quarter for which it has figures only 21 percent of advertising expenditure on digital screens went to retail and leisure destinations, and it is unlikely that more than half of that is attributable to leisure, where gyms and licensed premises have been the major adopters of the medium.

There is also recent research from the U.S. vividly showing that casinos and gyms were among the least effective venues for reaching large numbers of consumers. So it’s unlikely that a similar sector such as the amusements business will draw in significant revenue from mass-market advertising.

Yet with a well-defined customer demographic and long dwell times allowing for much more than the few seconds of exposure that can be expected from advertising screens in places like railway stations, they do have something to offer – and while installing digital displays with paid-for advertising as their main raison d’etre probably isn’t on the cards for amusements operators, it could nevertheless provide a useful secondary revenue stream.

As in any application of place-based screens, then, the secret is to define the existing audience, and then identify the new business opportunities that could be created by the ability to communicate and interact with them right there, right then.

Beyond the touchscreen

The next step in interaction beyond conventional touchscreens is the gesture-based interface, popularised by the like of Microsoft’s Kinect and Nintendo’s Wii. But ensuring ease of use, and not confusing the novice, are critical.

Many of the design best practices for gesture are similar to those for touch. “Simplicity and transparency are critical, and designers should create an application with a very short learning curve – a few seconds at the most,” says Omek, an Israeli firm that makes gesture-recognition and body-tracking software.

“Subtlety and complexity tend to be effective only in a relatively small and intimate setting. A kiosk or side room at a trade show is an obvious example.”

Other tips from Omek in a new guide to design principles for gesture-enabled digital signage include structuring content so that it attracts and involves viewers before asking them to take action, rather than requiring gestures to get started.

However, this still needs to be achieved within a relatively short time,  especially in situations where the audience is interacting with the display while waiting to do something else – catch a bus or get on a plane, for example. Omek suggests the complete experience should last roughly 30 seconds to two minutes.

And sticking to a small number of intuitive gestures is also important, the company says, although we will probably see larger gestural vocabularies as this kind of interactive medium becomes more common.

Finally, don’t forget that a physical encounter with digital signage needs to be physically comfortable.

“The degree of comfort in an application is dependent on the characteristics of the participant,” says Omek. “Teenagers, for instance, have no trouble interacting with a sign that requires them to hold their arms over their heads. Middle-aged or older people may find this gesture fatiguing and drop out quickly, though they are usually comfortable with relatively complex, chest-high gestures that require precise hand movements.

“Comfort is also psychological. Children, our experts agreed, have a stronger appetite for play than adults and are not troubled by the fear of looking ridiculous.”

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