Scheduling Interactive and Concurrently Running Applications in Pervasive Display Networks

Today's digital signage systems typically show advertisements in the form of images or short videos that their owners and/or operators have arranged in well-defined sequences well before presentation time. In order to make such displays more attractive, both researchers and advertisers have recently begun to explore the concept of interactive applications that allow passers-by to directly or indirectly control a display's content. To integrate such applications with traditional digital signage concepts requires new forms of shared control over application and content scheduling, ultimately creating multi-user and multi-application display systems that go beyond predefined sequences of content items. In this paper we present a system for scheduling both interactive content and traditional digital signage content on networked public displays. We offer a formal notation for describing such novel scheduling problems, based on a list of requirements for scheduling interactive and concurrently running display applications, and describe a web-based application development framework and API for dynamic application scheduling. We also report on an initial prototype system that we have deployed on a university campus.