Want A Remote Control for Digital Billboards?

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article that explored the idea of using Apple's iPhone to interact with digital signage. Well, those musings are becoming reality in London's Westfield mall, where visitors will encounter a 57 inch LCD screen which displays objects that can be controlled by touching and tapping the face of their iPhones.

Visitors can zoom in on items, rotate them and select different color variations. The screens launched with an image of a shoe, which users can spin and flip to view from all angles. Wanna see that in blue? Simply select your color of choice and the shoe instantly changes to the desired hue. The interactive shoe program was designed to show advertisers the potential of the screens as a marketing tool.

Russell Townsend, managing director at the digital creative agency Clusta, commented "Digital outdoor is an incredibly innovative medium, and as an industry we are really just scratching the surface of the weird and wonderful ways it can engage.” Roadside digital signage doesn't present the same opportunities for interactivity as pedestrian signage. Nevertheless, the linking of digital billboards to personal devices for passive interaction, such as automatic content delivery, seems like an inevitability at this point.