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I work in digital signage. We don't do these, but we do have other products aimed at retail. Most of these displays are powered by run of the mill Windows mach
by fy20 3y ago
I work in digital signage. We don't do these, but we do have other products aimed at retail.
Most of these displays are powered by run of the mill Windows machines. Often they are just standard off the shelf hardware, which when packed in an enclosed space with other electronics, and wrapped with cardboard, doesn't last too long. Even the screens are often just standard bigbox store TVs, although some manufactures do make displays specifically for digital signage (for 10x the price).
We have our own hardware running a custom Linux distro, and it's designed to operate in these sorts of environments. However not all accessories are. Right now we are trying to figure out what to do with a camera which is only designed to operate in environments under 50c where we keep having hardware failures.
The budget for installations like this most likely comes from the marketing department. So instead of paying for print ads with no idea how well they convert, the money is spent on digital signage which can at least track basic data like the number of impressions. Unfortunately in this case, it's probably treated like a win as they get more analytics data than they did before (impressions, door opens, open time).
- queuebert 3y ago> Right now we are trying to figure out what to do with a camera which is only designed to operate in environments under 50c where we keep having hardware failures. Have you tried putting them in a cooler?
- sleepybrett 3y agoI used to work digital signage in retail, though almost no refrigeration. And yes usually we backed our signs with normal small form factor pcs. Mac minis, nucs, raspberry-pis. We were demoed these screens by one of those display providers (probably Planar) probably 8 years back... If these are the 'transparent' door displays my understanding is that they are essentially just normal displays without backlights/or that foil backing. They were pretty experimental at the time and they were seeing if we had any room to experiment with them (we didn't at the time).. We did a bunch of experiments around 'ad tracking' displays in store by mounting cameras as well and writing basic opencv code that detected people looking at the display with mixed results. I've been out of the game awhile though.
- Jiocus 3y agoI also worked in digital signage a few years back. We had a similar kind of refrigerator in our office, likely with an LG screen. The door/screen was transparent glass like the old fashioned ones and a layer of LCD. The upside of that kind of design is that the see-through door still works if the screen is off. And of course, you actually would see the real contents of the refrigerator once it's digital signage content deactivated (e.g. detected people by camera). On top of that, depending on the animation you would see through darker parts of the door to get a peek of the actual products inside (useful if you're unsure what you're looking at). IIRC we displayed our office calendar on it, among other things. On the other hand, the screens in the article seems to have made away completely with the glass, leading to completely opaque, black rectangles if they are not running. What a mess.
- sleepybrett 3y agoprobably more readable though. With the displays at the time you could see through even the blacks it was like 50% transparent when displaying a totally black screen. Means you could see through it but the images you put on the display needed to be fairly simple and .. id dunno 'blocky' because depending on what was behind the glass it could get very visually confused.