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The increasingly sophisticated nature of digital signage is opening up new markets for the technology, including the live events industry, writes Saad Mouneimne.

Digital signage (DS) is an increasingly important feature of public spaces including airports, shopping malls, conference centres and entertainment arenas.

DS can perform multiple functions in one device: delivering information and directions, advertising and sponsor messages, and providing entertainment in a variety of forms.

For organisers of live events, DS technologies can provide an effective platform acting as a conduit for participation by individual viewers or groups of viewers.

The latest real-time update technologies make it possible for DS solutions to deliver increasingly localised services, creating a far more intimate dialogue with viewers.

These services can be used to create a sense of community and involvement at events such as conferences, sports tournaments and music festivals.

A DS solution fully integrated with a digital signage content management system can be designed with various levels of interactivity, and can deliver a very localised experience updating the service content in real time.

A fully localised solution can create a strong sense of participation, allowing an audience to gather into local groups around each DS display and compete against each other in games, quizzes and votes, using their mobile phones to interact with the server software driving the entertainment.

At a less sophisticated level, the DS system can provide ‘broadcast interactivity’ where a fully interactive scene runs in parallel at several locations around the event space, allowing viewers to interact, but without the same degree of localisation.

A typical use of this type of solution would allow all the attendees at a conference or concert to post images and Twitter messages to the server, which would then be continuously updated live on each display located within the event space.

A fully-featured interactive digital signage solution integrates a number of components in order to provide the framework for the necessary data processing and interaction.

Typically, a server or group of servers act as gateways/aggregators for incoming data from viewers, in the form of SMS messages or web-based input.

Another server hosts the core interactivity functions, processing the input data from the viewer and pulling in any extra data from external systems required to complete the interaction cycle, before passing the response back to the gateway/aggregator server handling the output queue.

This server completes the delivery of the system’s response to the viewer’s input, and once the cycle is complete, the next stage of interaction may initiate another cycle.

The range of technologies and protocols that can be incorporated into the interactive process can include almost any current means of digital communication on a phone or other mobile device, from text and email, through social networking sites like Twitter, instant messaging services such as MSN, RSS feeds, and so on.

In an example interaction, a viewer might initiate an interactive cycle by responding to an invitation on a digital signage screen with an SMS message. Typically, the message will contain a short code and keyword displayed on the screen as part of the signage display.

The gateway/aggregator servers add the viewer’s SMS message to the queue, from where it is collected by the interactivity server and passed to the software dialogue engine, which runs a range of functions specified as part of the design.

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The functions performed by the dialogue engine can be anything from a simple relaying of the message to the output queue server and then to the signage display, to far more complex operations.

The message can, for example, be published to an external destination such as a Twitter site, or to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system, where further operations can take place.

These operations can determine how the user receives a response (by text message to his or her phone, by email, by being entered into a competition, and so on), and the nature of any ongoing interaction initiated.

However, it’s not essential to use third-party systems: a sophisticated interaction can be handled within the core interactivity software. There are a number of applications on the market (including never.no’s Interactivity Suite) which are capable of a wide range of responses to input, including the collection of user-generated content from SMS messages, MMS, e-mail, instant messages, or images and video from mobile phones, and subsequent distribution to the required target.

The interactivity suite can generate dialogue responses with viewers via SMS/MMS, email or instant messaging software, while managing services like subscriptions, notifications or other types of textual information.

Depending on the type of event where the digital signage system is deployed, and the desired level of interactivity, interactions with the system may vary from a single viewer at any one time, to multiple concurrent interactions from large numbers of viewers.

A simple interaction cycle beginning with a viewer’s SMS response to an invitation on the DS display and ending with the receipt of a message to his mobile phone containing full event information in the form of a WAP push link, would be complete within a few seconds.

Advanced scenarios involving many stages such as surveys, competitions or game-type interactions, are more continuous and require the handling of large numbers of interactions from multiple users.

At live entertainment events, a popular form of interaction with digital signage systems is to involve the audience in posting content to the displays, either in the form of text, sound or images.

In this application, most event organisers choose to build in capacity for moderating user-submitted content for suitability before it’s sent to the displays. The design of the interactive service would then need to include forwarding the content to the moderation component. Some automated filtering of content can be developed using this software module but moderation is essentially a process that needs operator input.

The moderation component can be set up for any number of operators, and with any pipeline of previewing, storing and prioritising stages. User-generated or user-selected content can be designed to appear on the digital signage displays in the form of video carousels, image morphs, message boards, video or audio jukeboxes, games, specially-created graphics and more.

For event organisers and commercial partners these technologies can deliver reports on which services were used, with full traffic data, and further connectivity options such as XML-RPC triggering of detailed service information to external systems, with each interaction.

With the potential they offer for event organisers to design innovative ways of encouraging audience involvement, interactive digital signage systems offer a versatile platform for providing an extra dimension to the audience’s experience of an event — and one which can incorporate any number of mobile communication, social networking and data processing extensions.

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