Bye Bye Wututu

Oh well, our experiment with digital signage tracking is now over. Sadly, Wututu appear to have gone into administration... scuppered by the recession!

We have early data so we'll be analyzing the data and looking at how to move forward with another company if the need for this data is deemed important enough!

Goodbye to a great start up company!

Digital signage monitoring

We currently have 24 live digital signage screens across our five campuses at the University and they are a very valuable resources for us to push information out to all students very quickly. However, with another 12 coming online within the next few months what we don't know is, does anyone actually ever look at them?

So, we have now invested in some digital signage monitoring software that will allow us to measure if people are looking at the screens and for how long. A quick glance or a longer stare! The software works by using facial recognition to judge when a person is looking directly at the screen and tracks how long they look for. It also includes metrics on the gender of the person which is worked out with some clever judgement on face shape, hair style, height, etc and proves to be around 90% acurate.

In order to have the software running it needs to be installed on a small stand alone PC such as an EeePC and requires a webcam to be attached to the top of the screen you want to monitor. This then sends the information it gathers back to a hosted server that then displays the results via a dashboard display.

We looked at a couple of different solutions, Quividi, Wututu and CognoVision appeared to be the three leading companies and we eventually chose Wututu as our preferred supplier. As they all do very similar things it did become a costing exercise and Wututu was significantly cheaper!

It'll be an easy installation for us and when we start to receive some stats i'll make sure I post up the initial findings!

A video of how the software tracking looks can be seen below.

Digital delivery vans...

Another quick post about the Digital Signage Expo and a chance to put up the only photo I took on the day! An interesting idea for expanding on revenue generation with a van that has a large digital screen embedded into the side of it (see photo).

Potentially a money spinner as you could sell off advertising space to clients who would be advertised as your van carried out it's deliveries. A simple idea but in hard economic times it could bring in a few extra pounds.

The only downside, apart from installation costs, is that we didn't get to see how much of the inside of the van the screen took up, if you're only left with enough room for a single small cardboard box it might not be such a good idea!

Digital Signage Strategies Forum 2010

So I was lucky enough to be invited as a key note speaker at the Digital Signage Strategies Forum 2010 at Earls Court on Wednesday. I'm not entirely sure how they tracked me down but it was a brilliant day with some really good insights into how other people are running their systems. I'm biased obviously but it looks like we're doing most things well and we even had our supplier OneLan there running one of our layouts!

The talk went well, not too nervous (!) and we had a good round of questions at the end. We even had a couple of people taking photos of our slides! I asked a collegue, John Wells, from our Information Services Department to join me to talk about the Infrastructure Intergration.

The bonus of being there was also that we could visit the Screen Media Expo also being held at Earls Court. There were some really interesting developments in digital signage including dwell and recognition monitoring, flexible screens, laser displays and lots of other things that looked rather expensive! We'll be looking to implement a few of the things we've seen over the rest of the year so keep your eyes peeled for some interesting developments!

You can view the presentation below and why not head over to John's blog to read his posting here.