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

Digital displays, as the replacement of traditional static signs, have gained increasing popularity for out-of-home advertising. Latest advancements in smartphone, wireless communication, and digital display technologies make it possible to design new interactive signage systems linking the digital content with the physical digital displays. Although recent studies have demonstrated the trend of cyber-physical interaction, they are not generally scalable for multiple users, and none of them support interaction with multiple displays in one location. Smart Signage, a “draggable” cyber-physical broadcast/multicast (B/M) media system is proposed in this paper. With a novel cyber-physical B/M protocol that synchronizes the content on the digital displays with the smartphones, it supports one-to-many interaction by allowing multiple users acquiring content from one display with a “dragging” hand gesture. With the embedded display orientation information in the same protocol, Smart Signage supports many-to-many interaction by allowing users obtaining content from the digital display they are pointing at with their smartphones. Users' quality of experience, which is characterized by the response time, is carefully studied in this paper to guarantee the performance of this cyber-physical interactive display system.