Design Demystified

First off I am the Creative Director at MediaTile and have been here for about three years now. Digital signage was foreign to me before joining this team, but these days I find myself teaching as much as I am learning. I believe that our industry has the potential to elevate the world of advertising by providing a more seamless experience that provides real time, relevant, and accurate information to users who actually want it, and the only way to get there is by spreading what I know to as many people as I can.

I have been working in the field of digital media in one form or another for close to 10 years now. My background is in broadcast television where I learned the ropes of the industry. I spent hundreds of hours behind a studio camera, and eventually ended up in the editing suite making the station's first all digital advertisements. During that process I fell in love with computer animation and graphics, and have pursued that passion ever since.

Silicon Valley is my home, and I was raised with a computer in my hands. I wrote my first computer program (tic-tac-toe) when I was about 7 years old using a book about BASIC programming in DOS. That machine was a Tandy 1000SX with an 8088 processor, a true dinosaur!

Today I'm still coding a bit, but generally only to further my creativity. AfterEffects is my current love affair, and I get a real thrill of simulating 3D spaces in a 2D environment. That's not to say that I don't enjoy 3D modeling and animation, actually that's what I studied in college, but tricking the mind through perception is amazing to me.

My goal with this blog is to inform and educate where I can, but also to learn from our readers, because as once said by Confucius "When you know something, say what you know. When you don't know something, say that you don't know. That is knowledge."

MediaTile formed the creative content services group, named MediaServices, in 2007 in an effort to enable companies to learn about, develop, and commission top notch content for their digital signage networks.

The best Return On Investment will be seen when a strong content strategy has been put in place and messaging goals have been set and met. Electronic signs offer a very versatile platform for delivery of relevant and up-to-date messaging. However; it is the quality and uniqueness of the content that defines the success of that network.

The MediaServices team is available to assist your company in defining strategy, developing content goals, and setting benchmarks for measurement. From providing training, to production of advertisements and new technologies, we excel at making the best of your digital signage. Through this blog we will share our knowledge, introduce you to new tools and features in MediaCast, and discuss market trends.

Please comment and question, because we like to learn from those around us and strive to unify the industry through direct communication and broad networking.

Content and application developers now have another exciting way to get their applications out to the masses. Adobe has released AIR for the Android Market. Examples and information for developers are available, and owners of Adobe Flash CS5, or Flash Builder 4 can start publishing their apps today!

Adobe AIR is a "run-time engine" which essentially means it allows applications written in Adobe Flash's "ActionScript 3" programming language to run on a given device. With Apple recently lifting restrictions on app development for the iTunes App store you can now write an application that works on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and Linux with one set of tools.

This is really awesome geek news!

-- By David Trounstine --

So, my wife and I just picked up new phones this week. We decided on the Sprint EVO 4G, and to be honest I find it hard to call a phone. The next wave of personal computing is definitely in the palm of our hands, and the potential to engage customers where the work and play is almost limitless.

As the network providers build out 4G services across the country, content developers must begin to think of how we can gobble up all of that bandwidth. Dynamic advertising, 4G applications, video streams, and 2-way interactions are all great targets, but deep interactions and linkages to this new wave of hand-held mobile computers is going to be key.

Digital Signage is going to play a big role in driving traffic to the 4G network. While we will continue to provide compelling advertising that is contextually based and personally relevant, we also will begin driving interactions where it is too costly or inconvenient to put a human. We can be new touch points for a brand, virtual marketers who direct customers to new promotions and opportunities, or off-site customer service representatives who can be contacted in an instant.

In the near future people will be walking around with more computing power and bandwidth on their mobile phones than existed on a desktop 5 years ago. As my good friend put it "everyone gets a tricorder!". Thanks Evan, I can't wait until I can detect a deposit of dilithium crystal to power my warp drive.

- By David Trounstine -

Recently I was asked to speak at the first annual Digital Signage for Corporate Communications conference. It was a wonderful event where many of us got to share and learn about the experiences of working with digital signage in a corporate communications environment.

Corporate communications content really is its own beast, and all too often treated as a lower priority. I firmly believe that the better a company does at communicating important, relevant, and motivating messages to their employees, the better they will do at customer service, productivity, and worker retention. Informed employees are happier employees, and that's what we're all after.

The presentation I gave was geared toward the idea of treating your digital signage network as a company "television network". I encouraged communicators to think of their employees as their audience, and create content that was built for them. The use of personally relevant content is going to help foster a relationship between the employee and the information network, which will invariably lead to higher viewership.

I, for one, had a great time at the event, and I hope that the information I put together was informative and helpful. Here's my presentation. Enjoy.

- By David Trounstine -

Some of our clients don't have the in-house expertise to create, manage and deploy their own content. That's why our team exists. In fact we have some clients who completely rely on us for everything that is shown on their digital signage network. As the economy has forced many of us to tighten up our budgets we are starting to enable these clients take on some of the creative work in an effort to help keep them in the black throughout these tough times. The process is tougher than you might think, but it all comes down to taking small steps toward the goal.

Charles Fleharty, MediaTile's Director of Content Development and one of the engineers behind the new Human Kiosk with 4G VideoPresence, in conjunction with our portal engineering team created a fantastic web-based application that we call Composer. Simply put is is a content editing tool that allows a user to change pre-built templates to include relevant and up-to-date information without the use of a cumbersome and expensive set of digital design tools.

Using Composer our clients can create great looking content with a few simple steps, all within their web browser. The templates can be custom built to the needs of a client. They can include a number of very cool dynamic functions such as RSS display, time & date, and even weather. All parts of the template can be animated, and when the user makes changes to the text or imagery the animation is preserved.

We met recently with a client who uses interactive content to engage their users and provide them with current event information relative to the local area. It would be very development intensive to provide them with a "template" version of this touch screen application, so instead we suggested moving some of that content out to an attractor screen. Allowing passers-by to see the content, and be encouraged to learn more by interacting with the touch screen.

We are pushing forward with the next version of the software as I type this, and the new features will really make the template approach shine. I highly recommend that our clients check it out, and if you aren't a MediaTile client consider making templates that work for your system to aid you in achieving your design goals.

- By David Trounstine -

Our partnership with Alcatel/Lucent and 4G VideoPresence has been mentioned several times in our blog now, but I just wanted to give the design team perspective.

4G VideoPresence is two-way video conferencing software for your digital signage network that will allow customers to connect directly to a specialist at the point in time that they have a decision to make. There has already been a lot of buzz around it, and we have interest from a number of different vertical markets.

With 4G delivery of content is going to become much less restrictive. "Store and forward" will be an option, not a requirement, as full HD video and interactive content will be able to stream to any enabled consumer electronic device. We are talking real time user interaction with Internet based content, and instant feedback to content providers.

Real time interactions draw users in, they also provide extremely useful information because it can be contextual and relevant. Using 4G to drive these real time interactions means they can happen anywhere at anytime, without the need for complicated infrastructure.

Bi-directional video chat is only the beginning... we have much more to come, so stay tuned!

- By David Trounstine -

OK it has been almost a year since I have posted any entries to our design/development blog, and for that I apologize. So much has happened in the last year I don't quite know where to start, but you will be happy to know that I have regained my focus on providing information to the digital signage community about design and development.

The name of the game today is 4G. Being that MediaTile is a cellular digital signage company we have been feverishly working to develop new applications and uses for the high bandwidth of 4G, and some very interesting products are in store for the next 12 months.

In case you missed the announcements from earlier this year we are now doing public demonstrations of 4G VideoPresence, a point-to-point two way video chat client that enables digital signage audiences to connect with customer services representatives instantly and personally. We won a first place award for the concept at the CTIA show, and oh man has it generated some buzz for us.

We are very excited about what's to come, and I will do my best to keep up with the pace and provide insider details.

That's all for now, but I will be writing more... soon!

-By David Trounstine

This week Adobe held their yearly design and development conference, Adobe MAX. Many cool demos were displayed and some great new info about the next iteration of flash was discussed.

In an effort to unify the devices in our lives under a single standard, Adobe has evolved Flash into a very powerful production, delivery, and display platform. Other programs like Cold Fusion and Flex Builder give developers the tools necessary to create seamless experiences for users across a whole sea of consumer electronics.

Demonstrations on netbooks, smart phones, touch screens, and more showed the ability for Flash to improve communication and enable businesses to spread their content far further than ever before.

While there was no clear cut demo of digital signage at the MAX show it was pretty clear that the DOOH market would see huge benefits from the improvements being made to Flash and it's companion tools. The performance improvements to video playback alone are astonishing, and will surely make Flash one of the more popular next-generation players for HD and interactive content.

Using an HP TouchSmart screen one presenter played HD video (which looked amazing), he then simply tapped the screen and up popped an information overlay providing the user with current time, weather, relevant content relating to the video and more. This type of interface empowers the user to make choices and receive content based on trends in which they are taking part, and reduces the perception that they are being "spammed" with irrelevant information.

I'm a big fan of the Flash platform, and use it for a huge amount of the work we do here at MediaTile. It seems that the updates to come will finally provide us the tools we need, and the performance required, to produce content and products that will truly revolutionize the marketplace.

-By David Trounstine-

Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, and many other social networking sites employ RSS as an alternative method of delivering their data to consumers. This structured data can easily be leveraged on a digital sign to supply viewers with up-to-date and personally relevant information.

But you don't need to be a social networking jockey to leverage the power of this file standard. XML based data transfer is an established method of communication between databases. However, the structure of the XML is important and RSS provides a standard that is widley accepted, simple to understand, and easy to display.

A company can leverage RSS to improve communication with employees or consumers at multiple touch points through out their day. In fact, many digital signage and digital picture frame manufacturers are using RSS to feed their screens and connect consumers to their website through consistency.

To enhance their RSS feeds and enable users to include their photos in a feed, Yahoo! developed an extension to the RSS architecture allowing media files to be associated with a particular story or RSS entry. This new format is called MRSS, or MediaRSS.

The structure is very similar to RSS except there is an additional chunk in the XML called a "media" node. This node contains a various meta data for the piece of media such as author/publisher, file size, length, etc. The addition of this node allows MRSS to associate many pieces of media with an individual RSS entry. RSS 2.0 only allows for 1 embeded media item for each RSS entry. MRSS provides a simple and open method of passing information and media from one system to another, and has begun its integration into the world of digital signage because of the versatility, compatibility, and expandability that it offers.

Digital signage content is most effective when it is relevant and personal. Simple solutions are often overlooked, but in the case of RSS and MRSS we should pay close attention. The number of available data sources will grow exponentially because of this technology, and providing your target audience with personalized content will be very simple.

Many digital signage companies have already integrated Flash into their systems, and some rely on it completely; from content management interface, to player software and scheduling. Flash is a very powerful and versatile application that can be used to build a wide range of content such as animated spots that dynamically load relevant information or interactive applications that respond to SMS messages.

It is clear, through Adobe's updates and enhancements, that HD video support, database integration, and enabling application development are the top priorities. This is wonderful for our industry. Within the next 2 - 5 years the availability of content data streams that are personally relevant to individual viewers or demographics will become increasing available, and as that happens Flash will certainly be the most widely used tool for harvesting and displaying this data at the relevant point of interaction with a viewer.

The Open Screen Project will be a big win for content distributors and producers alike, because consistant methods of creation and deployment will be put forth by some of the biggest names in the world of technology. Digital signage content will never be the same. Hooray for standards!!

- By David Trounstine -

H.264 (or AVC, Advanced Video Codec) is a video compression codec that is efficient, high quality, and pervasive. Many mobile devices used to display video rely on this codec because despite the small file size it generates, the quality is extremely high. In fact, Blu-ray technology uses H.264 to fit several hours of content onto high definition DVDs.

While H.264 may not be new to the world of digital signage it has never been accepted or offered up as an industry standard, which is unfortunate. It offers many benefits over other codecs, such as very small file size, high quality images even at low bit rates, and broad user acceptance/understanding. It is also natively supported by many, if not most, software video players so it can be adopted with relative ease.

For video based digital signage content, my recommendation is to use H.264/MPEG4 compression at a resolution and bit rate that fits your system. The video files created by MediaServices are always 1280x720, 30FPS, 3MB/s and I must say the quality at such a low bit rate is very well maintained.

Digital signage content suffers from the same ailment that web browsers did in the early 1990's... a complete lack of agreed upon standards with which new technologies and content can/should be created. A lack of standards creates an environment where each technology provider is working in a vacuum resulting in industry uncertainty and significant migration issues.

We need a organization like W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to develop a set of standards for digital signage so that we, as an industry, can work toward enhancing content rather than developing yet another new way to approach digital signage technology. While there isn't a W3C of digital signage with an established set of industry standards, there are a number of groups that are beginning to make significant headway in this regard.

POPAI, the global association for marketing at retail, has taken it upon themselves to become this consortium. They have brought technology providers together to publish standards on hardware and protocols, and recently they have begun working on software standards. I commend the efforts POPAI has taken, and it will certainly help the industry mature.

Additionally, the Digital Signage Association (DSA) has established the Content Committee to be a guide for "Best Practices" for creating content. Both of these groups are making big strides toward building a foundation for digital signage technology and content.

The most important action a digital signage company can take is to be involved with the standards process, because as we begin to see adoption of hardware and software standards across the industry content will become much easier to create and manage. We must get to the point where a single piece of content can be created and used on multiple networks, and digital signage technology becomes as transparent as web technology. We still have quite a long way to go.

- By David Trounstine -

"Image resolution describes the detail an image holds"~ Wikipedia ~

When creating digital signage content the quality of your imagery will have a significant impact on the target audience. Any given media asset must be created to best utilize the platform on which it will be displayed, and digital signage is no exception. The perceived quality of an image is primarily based on the resolution of the asset and the system that will display it. When discussing resolution two forms of measurement are commonly used; Pixel Resolution and Spatial Resolution. I will give you a bit of technical detail on these measures and the situations in which each is relevant.

When we describe an image as "three megapixels", we are literally saying that image is comprised of about 3 million unique pixels. This is represented in width-by-height dimensions as 2048 x 1536px (3.15M). So the image has 2048 pixels in the X-axis and 1536 in the Y-axis. This is referred to as Pixel Resolution or Pixel Count, and represents the total number of pixels used to make up this asset.

The Spatial Resolution of an image refers to the number of pixels across a given unit of length (i.e. an inch). However, Spatial Resolution is dependent upon the system in which the media asset is being viewed be it a computer monitor, TV screen, or magazine. Each system will utilize pixels differently, and any asset made for display in that system will have to be adjusted accordingly to maintain a high quality appearance. In a general sense spatial resolution can also be thought of as pixel density, while pixel resolution is equivalent to pixel volume(or area).

If you have a 30" monitor that has a pixel count of 1920x1080 and you want to make an image fill the screen. You should create an image that is 1920x1080 pixels. This is where many people will then ask, "What DPI do you need it to be?". The answer is, it doesn't matter. It can be 1 DPI or 1,000,000 DPI the image will fill the screen either way. The monitor will map each pixel in the image directly to a pixel on the screen. Therefore the image will appear sharp and well defined, and will be 30" in size.

If you take that same image (1920x1080px in size) and send it to your printer it will print to about 6.5" x 3.5", a far cry from the 30" image produced on the monitor. This is because most printers produce images that are 300 DPI(PPI), meaning that every inch of print space will contain 300 pixels. (1920px / 300dpi = 6.4in  and 1080px / 300dpi = 3.6in)

Designers who have worked in multiple industries know that an image designed for the web will rarely contain enough data to be printed, although it may appear extremely sharp and detailed when viewed on a computer monitor. Similarly, content for digital signage may contain assets from web, television, or print projects, but ultimately should be rebuilt to meet the recommended specifications of the hardware. So, when you are designing for digital signage you must know the Pixel Resolution of the displays and make your best effort to use assets that do not require any up-sampling (increase in pixel density). Doing this will ensure the best possible image quality.