We live just off kew bridge road, which turns into a long thin car park every morning and evening as commuters struggle to cross the Thames. So a massive opportunity for billboard advertisers, and lo and behold they spent a good part of last year putting up a large, very permanent, billboard with one of those rotating thingys that changes the ad every few seconds. This year they took all the rotating thingy stuff out and replaced it with a massive electronic billboard. Now the adverts are in motion.
We see the same thing happening on the underground and in supermarkets. The new digital signs look good and attract attention because they have motion. They are also a lot cheaper to change ads.
But where is all this going? The big news here is gesture control. A series of cameras in the sign detect your gestures and react to them. So a digital sign can be a game, you can amuse yourself on the underground just by pointing at the screen. A bit like (actually a lot like) the Tom Cruise character in Minority Report. These cameras pick up your gestures in 3D so this is a lot more than a touch-screen.
This technology is here now, but the applications remain potential.
http://www.gesturetek.com/
http://www.reactrix.com/
What next.
This is where you creative types come in. What could you use gesture control for? It gets even more exciting when you look into the futre and take gesture control to 3d displays (Volumetric displays)
Bob Browning's blog 
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