Screenmedia Magazine - digital signage, digital out-of-home, convergent media, screenmedia magazine

Light pollution is one of the principal complaints levelled at digital billboards by their opponents. But a Dutch company believes it has the answer in an alternative display technology called electrowetting.

Most digital billboards use LED bulbs, which beam out coloured light. But Miortech is proposing displays based on electrowetting, a process first developed by Philips Research which involves altering the water-repellent characteristics of a surface by applying an electric field to it.

When no field is present on a tiny pixel-sized area of the surface, oil sits on that area, making it dark.

But as soon as a voltage is applied, the surface becomes less water-repellent and another liquid is able to flow over it, pushing away the oil within milliseconds and allowing the pixel to reflect light.

Share this post

British digital out-of-home operator Amscreen is to become one of the biggest users of facial recognition for audience measurement, rolling out Quividi’s technology to more than 6000 screens across its networks over the coming months.

The fast-growing operator, which has been expanding into Europe and now gets more than 50m views each week of its small screens mostly situated in retail outlets, is giving a vote of confidence to the technology after a year-long trial.

The Quividi system will analyse audiences by gender and age as well as recording the date, time and volume of views. Amscreen claims that 94 percent of shoppers in the venues where its screens are present view the content.

Share this post