Found on the Way Home from Display Week 2012

While returning home from Display Week, I noticed a large interactive digital sign offering game play in the San Francisco airport. The sign (pictured below) is made up of nine tiled 46-in. LCDs. The touch system is optical multi-touch, with cameras and scanning lasers mounted in a protruding circular housing visible at the top center of the sign.



(Photo by Author)

The object of the game was to match eight pairs of simple icons as quickly as possible (the boat outline above the “Touch to Start” instructions is an example of the icons). It sounds easy, but I found it to be surprisingly difficult. I tried the game four times, and the best time I could achieve was 1 minute and 8 seconds. The “Time to beat” was 25 seconds. I suspect that that time was produced by multiple people playing simultaneously (the touch system is multi-touch, after all). Every time I played it, people stopped to watch, but nobody volunteered to join me.

The supplier of the sign is Monster Media, a leader in non-traditional advertising. The video montage on its home page is well worth watching; it runs at least a couple of minutes before repeating. One curious aspect of this particular sign is that it never showed any advertising; perhaps it was between campaigns.--Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile