Interactive Public Displays Making Public Displays Interactive Everywhere

Large public displays are becoming increasingly common. Because they’re digital, their visible content can be freely adjusted, and the underlying computing architecture enables practically unrestricted flexibility. Despite their capabilities, they haven’t moved far beyond advertising posters: their content is controlled by either their owners and providers or the companies showing passive (but sometimes animated) ads on them. So, they’re mostly noninteractive information broadcasters with severely limited possibilities. Such displays could provide content that’s more interactive. For example, they could lend display space “on the go” or engage and entertain passersby. However, their public nature and individual capabilities and characteristics, such as location and size, lead to various challenges. These challenges include different input capabilities and viewing distances. One common, promising way to interact with large public displays is through mobile devices. Because these devices are readily at hand, they can become personal devices for manipulating the displays’ content (for example, through multitouch). Most important, this approach allows for interaction at a distance—a situation that becomes more necessary as display sizes increase. To empower designers to develop ways to interact in a broad range of settings, we’ve developed a conceptual framework and technical implementation that rely solely on the public displays and users’ mobile devices. We based this framework on our previous prototypes,1–3 each of which explored one aspect of using mobile devices to interact with distant displays (see Figure 1). This framework will let us transform the existing implementations into a unified toolkit that allows rapid prototyping of such interactions. Instead of using (possibly) more accurate tracking technologies that must be preinstalled wherever the interaction should take place, our implementation allows for instantaneous deployment in a multitude of environments and scenarios without altering the surroundings.