Mercury

Abstract

As the cost of display hardware falls so the number of public display networks being deployed is increasing rapidly. While these networks have traditionally taken the form of digital signage used for advertising and information there is increasing interest in the vision of "open display networks" [8]. A key component of any open display network is an effective channel for disseminating applications created by third-parties and recent research has proposed a display-oriented "application store" as one such channel [5]. In this paper we present a critical analysis of the requirements and design of display application stores -providing insights designed to help the implementers of future application stores.

A Longitudinal Study of Pervasive Display Personalisation

“…Further, whilst in our setting users reported that it was a single Channel (Bus Departures) that led them to want to use Tacita, and on average our users selected a small number of the available Tacita Channels, it is entirely possible that in other settings it would be the cumulative value of lots of smaller applications that prompt users to value personalised pervasive displays. In both cases, there is benefit in encouraging higher levels of innovation in display application development, as seen in initiatives for the creation of display application stores [12]. What happens if multiple people try and personalise the same display?…”

“…Typically, the displays show a mix of static content (such as slides with departmental or university-wide news), videos, and websites specifically developed to deliver content for public displays. The display schedule and content can be configured by screen owners and content creators through a set of web-based user interfaces (e-Channels [20] and the Mercury App Store [12]). Display nodes run Yarely, a digital signage player that retrieves display schedules from backend services in the form of Content Descriptor Sets (CDSs), an XML-based format describing content items and their scheduling constraints (e.g.…”