Smart Signage: A Draggable Cyber-physical Broadcast/Multicast Media System

Digital signages are increasingly common for out-of-home advertising. Latest advancements in smartphones, wireless communication and displays make it possible to design smarter interactive signage systems for more effective advertising. Although existing research have started a trend of cyber-physical interactions, they are generally not scalable for multiple users and not intuitive to interact with. Smart Signage - a "draggable" cyber-physical broadcast/multicast (B/M) media system is therefore proposed here. With a novel cyber-physical B/M protocol that enables a display concurrently interacting with physical actions of multiple user smartphones, a large number of users can simultaneously acquire any running content on a display by simply using an intuitive "dragging" hand gesture with their smartphones. Analytical formulations are derived to identify the key parameters and their dynamics in the system, which provide the condition for achieving the average response time of a user "dragging" gesture within 1 second limit. Implementations are demonstrated for possible real-world deployments. Experiments with 30 primary students are conducted to prove the system offering scalable and intuitive interactions for the first-time users even when they are moving. © 2012 IEEE