2011-2012-Interactive Billboard

Interactive Billboard

by Brian Setz and Ruurtjan Pul

The potential

Digital billboards currently do not use any interaction. There are currently some examples who use some form of interaction, but none of them use direct input from the user to dynamically change the contents of the billboard. We perceived two trends that are currently happening:

1. Digital billboards are becomming more and more popular
2. Smartphones are becoming mainstream

The application

We created an interactive billboard. It consists of a puzzle and a QR-code. When people scan the QR-code with their phones, it takes them to a website where they are presented with a small puzzle. The puzzle represents a small piece of the billboard ad. As they solve the puzzle, the progress gets displayed real-time on the billboard (player-billboard interaction). When they solve a puzzle they get rewarded with a key, which they can use later on or give to another player (player-player interaction).

Technical details

The application was built using the following libraries:

• Server side
  • Node-JS (hosts the game and serves as a webserver)
  • Socket.io (for bi-directional synchronous communication)
• Client-side
  • jQuery (for easy document manipulation)
  • jQuery UI (for drag-drop support)