A Projection Avatar Lands at La Guadia

At La Guardia, a Smiling Helper Materializes, Digitally

" Marie is an avatar, a life-size image of a woman digitally broadcast from a projector onto an inch-thick glass screen coated with a special film, said Luis Vega, 39, the vice president of Parabit Systems, the company that built Marie. The device uses motion sensors to prompt Marie’s 90-second script whenever anyone comes within 30 feet of her. Marie stopped many travelers in their tracks on Wednesday morning, and some walked a circle around her to see how she worked. Others took photos. “I thought it was really a person at first glance,” said Alex Reiss, 21...."

Of course, the image is flat, and it is restricted to whatever shape the glass cut-out is (so the person filmed for the content must remain still) but it does look quite a bit like the holographic images from the "Star Wars" movies. Being able to see behind the image gives the illusion of 3D. One was on display at Digital Signage Expo and attracted a lot of attention.

Airports were early users of public electronic information displays, even before the flat panel era. It is not surprising that they would adopt this unique but somewhat expensive but striking technology. Projection type displays are increasingly "off the radar" in many markets. However, that may be due to not having quite the right product as projection can still provide great value and unique form factors.

The placing of this particular technology at the airports around New York give some indication of just how large the digital signage market can be. In-spite of the substantial price, the avatar does not replace a person as having a person there full time would be unaffordable. This bit of digital signage provides a new service at an affordable cost even at tens of thousands. Simpler signage can be envisioned at virtually every sort of commercial outlet even down to the smallest mom & pop.

Norm

Digital Signage as a Retail product

From Today's DigitalSignageToday.com

"Is the future of digital signage for sale, retail?"

"LG Electronics USA recently announced that it had struck a deal with retailer Fry's Electronics Inc. to feature an LG digital signage solution at the chain's 34 nationwide locations and on the retailer's website."

In an earlier article "Unaccounted and Digital Signage" (High Resolution November 13, 2009, I argued that the LCD makers should produce a dual mode LCD platform, one that is capable of performing both as digital signage and as a consumer TV. LG actually has offered such a product and has now gone a step further, the important step, in offering digital signage displays through an electronics retailer. This solves several important problems both for the LCD maker, for brick and mortar retailers, and for the consumer.

With TV volumes stagnant and with increasing sales through on-line retailers, digital signage sales offer a new category and new volume to the retailer. Digital signage LCDs, with all of their unique features such as extra brightness for outdoors, offer a new up-sell opportunity for the retailer to home TV set consumers. For the digital signage purchaser, availability of digital signage displays through local retail outlets offer immediate availability of both displays for new installations, spares availability, and lower overall distribution costs. For the TV Set consumer, digital signage in retail offers the opportunity to take advantage of some of the digital signage features, some of which may not be so obvious.

I have previously argued on one of the digital signage LinkedIN blogs that since most large TVs are delivered (either by purchase on-line or by brick and mortar store delivery) to the home, Individual packaging for TVs was somewhat wasteful. With retail availability of digital signage, presumably, some of the signage will come in multi-packs and I would expect 55" and larger TVs to be available in multi-packs as well.

Beyond that, as I have related elsewhere, At Digital Signage Expo, I asked one of the display industry luminaries if digital signage could ever be as big for the display industry as TV. He gave me a blank stare and could not answer. With US growth rates (in number of screens deployed per year) exceeding 30% through the recession, certainly going forward the volumes could be substantial. Channeling much of this volume through retail will re-energize the entire TV category and lead to increased innovation as new features that are first introduced in commercial product, find their way into the home. In the end, the decision to offer signage through retail may be the biggest innovation in TV since the introduction of flat panels.

Norm

Solar Radiation on Digital Signage

I attended an outstanding webinar on digital signage given by Peter Kaszycki of MRI. In the webinar he mentioned that the morning or evening sun in winter can be as bad for an LCD as the noon day sun in summer. I found some interesting data to back that up.

The chart comes from Research Needs: Glass Solar Reflectance and Vinyl Siding by R. Hart, C. Curcija, D. Arasteh, H. Goudey, C. Kohler, S. Selkowitz in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkely Labs. Solar radiation can be a much larger contributor to the display temperature than than the ambient temperature. In fact data from the study shows that for black vinyl siding, solar radiation can raise surface temperatures to 70 degrees F higher than the ambient. Further, if the display is near a window and gets surface reflections from that window, it can get a double dose, or more, of solar radiation.

This picture shows the side of a house on a winter day when the ambient air was 24 degrees. The light on the side of the house is a reflection from the windows of a neighboring house. The issue of solar radiation and reflections has been well studied in the vinyl siding industry as it is a common cause for product replacement. The LCD being new to outdoor environments will experience the same conditions.

An important additional point to consider... because solar radiation is delivered at the speed of light rather than being conveyed by air currents or thermal conduction, the surface of the vinyl siding or the LCD can equilibrate with the current level of solar radiation within 10 minutes. Unlike heat transfer from the ambient, there are no thermal conduction issues or boundary layer effects. So, if some other surface happens to reflect directly on your digital signage installation for only twenty minutes; but the wrong time of day 20 minutes; that can be enough to cook your installation. Further, as contact burns can be almost instantaneous above 145 degrees and everyone assumes that every large LCD within reach is a touch panel, there could be some consumer complaints as well.

"But all we've discovered is that the blaze was started from a great distance through the refraction and convergence of light." from "Limoney Snickets: A Series of Unfortunate Events"


Norm

Microsoft Becomes a Display Maker

A New Vista for the Display Industry

Microsoft has purchases Perceptive Pixel. As computing has become more and more graphic, Microsoft has increasingly been increasingly involved in display technology. It began with Microsoft Vista, when Microsoft intruded upon what had been Intel's domain in specifying the desired resolution of notebook displays. Microsoft added a different touch in changing the specs from from just a raw resolution (e.g. 1024 x 768) to a desired dots per inch (dpi or pixels per inch.. ppi), more commonly used in the print industry. They also promulgated color fidelity standards, modified their operating system to embrace touch panels, and produced the first "Microsoft Surface" (later renamed when Microsoft introduced its own tablet using that same name).

Perceptive Pixel is a maker of large sized touch panels commonly used by television commentators for weather or for on-camera telestrating. As such, my own impression is that that business might have been a better fit within Cisco with its studio telepresence business. So, there are two questions, first, what is microsoft going to do with Perceptive Pixel? It could be an intellectual property (IP) play in order to gain better control of the direction of touch technology in general. It could be specifically a move to strengthen the position of the Microsoft OS in the digital signage and public information displays market. It could even be part of some greater move into hardware.

The second question is will any of Microsoft's potential competitors respond by purchasing their own touch panel companies or maybe even other display technologies. As the marketing emphasis of new devices is increasingly wrapped around what kind of display the device has, will the major hardware OEMs or others in the market be content to buy common technology from display companies or will they want to own either the IP or or the supply chain to grant them unique competitive advantage. In the initial part of the touch revolution, Apple secured a great advantage by contracting for much of the available production capability (interestingly from a company called Touch Revolution). However, as the industry grows and touch panel production grows, large supply contracts will have to face even larger supply capability. So... how do you maintain competitive advantage for the technology used on your device displays?

Norm