Digital signage application : developing a public venue multimedia touch-screen

La señalización digital o digital signage es una tecnología de comunicaciones digital que se está usando en los últimos años para reemplazar a la antigua publicidad impresa. Esta tecnología mejora la presentación y promoción de los productos anunciados, así como facilita el intercambio de información gracias a su colocación en lugares públicos o al aire libre. Las aplicaciones con las que cuenta este nuevo método de publicidad son muy variadas, ya que pueden variar desde ambientes privados en empresas, hasta lugares públicos como centros comerciales. Aunque la primera y principal utilidad de la señalización digital es la publicidad para que el usuario sienta una necesidad de adquirir productos, también la posibilidad de ofrecer más información sobre determinados artículos a través de las nuevas tecnologías es muy importante en este campo. La aplicación realizada en este proyecto es el desarrollo de un programa en Adobe Flash a través de lenguaje de programación XML. A través de una pantalla táctil, el usuario de un museo puede interactivamente acceder a un menú en el que aparecen los diferentes estilos de arte en un determinado tiempo de la historia. A través de una línea de tiempo se puede acceder a información sobre cada objeto que esté expuesto en la exhibición. Además se pueden observar imágenes de los detalles más importantes del objeto que no pueden ser vistos a simple vista, ya que no está permitido manipularlos. El empleo de la pantalla interactiva sirve para el usuario de la exhibición como una herramienta extra para recabar información sobre lo que está viendo, a través de una tecnología nueva y fácil de usar para todo el mundo, ya que solo se necesita usar las propias manos. La facilidad de manejo en aplicaciones como estas es muy importante, ya que el usuario final puede no tener conocimientos tecnológicos por lo que la información debe darse claramente. Como conclusión, se puede decir que digital signage es un mercado que está en expansión y que las empresas deben invertir en el desarrollo de contenidos, ya que las tecnologías avanzan aunque el digital signage no lo haga, y este sector podría ser muy útil en un futuro no muy lejano, ya que la información que es capaz de transmitir al espectador en todos los lugares es mucho más válida y útil que la proporcionada por un simple póster impreso en una valla publicitaria. Abstract The Digital signage is a digital communications technology being used in recent years to replace the old advertising printed. This technology improves the presentation and promotion of the advertised products, and makes easy the exchange of information with its placement in public places or outdoors. The applications that account this new method of advertising are several; they can range from private rooms in companies, to public places like malls. Although the first major utility of Digital signage is the advertising that makes the user feel and need of purchasing products. In addition, the chance of providing more information about certain items through new technologies is very important in this field. The application made in this project is the development of a program in Adobe Flash via XML programming language. Through a touch-screen, a museum user can interactively access a menu in which different styles of art in a particular time in history appears. Through a timeline you can access to information about each object that is exposed on display. Also you can see pictures of the most important details of the object that can not be seen with the naked eye, since it is not allowed to manipulate it. The use of the interactive screen serves to the user exhibition as an extra tool to gather information about what is seeing through a new technology and easy to use for everyone, since only need to use one’s own hands. The ease of handling in applications such as this is very important as the end user may not have expertise technology so the information should be clearly. As conclusion, one can say digital signage is an expansion market and companies must invest in content development, as although digital technologies advance digital signage does not, and this sector could be very useful in a near future, because information that is able of transmitting the everywhere viewer is much more valid and useful than that provided by a simple printed poster on a billboard.

The future of the public library:reimagining the moral economy of the 'people's university'

New media technologies, the digitisation of information, learning archives and heritage resources are changing the nature of the public library and museums services across the globe, and, in so doing, changing the way present and future users of these services interact with these institutions in real and virtual spaces. New digital technologies are rewriting the nature of participation, learning and engagement with the public library, and fashioning a new paradigm where virtual and physical spaces and educative and temporal environments operate symbiotically. It is with such a creatively disruptive paradigm that the £193 million Library of Birmingham project in the United Kingdom is being developed. New and old media forms and platforms are helping to fashion new public places and spaces that reaffirm the importance of public libraries as conceived in the nineteenth century. As people’s universities, the public library service offers a web of connective learning opportunities and affordances. This article considers the importance of community libraries as sites of intercultural understanding and practical social democracy. Their significance is reaffirmed through the initial findings in the first of a series of community interventions forming part of a long-term project, ‘Connecting Spaces and Places’, funded by the Royal Society of Arts.

Encounters and content sharing in an urban village : reading texts through an archaeological lens

Archaeology provides a framework of analysis and interpretation that is useful for disentangling the textual layers of a contemporary lived-in urban space. The producers and readers of texts may include those who planned and developed the site and those who now live, visit and work there. Some of the social encounters and content sharing between these people may be artificially produced or manufactured in the hope that certain social situations will occur. Others may be serendipitous. With archaeology’s original focus on places that are no longer inhabited it is often only the remaining artefacts and features of the built environment that form the basis for interpreting the social relationships of past people. Our analysis however, is framed within a contemporary notion of archaeological artefacts in an urban setting. Unlike an excavation, where the past is revealed through digging into the landscape, the application of landscape archaeology within a present day urban context is necessarily more experiential, visual and based on recording and analysing the physical traces of social encounters and relationships between residents and visitors. These physical traces are present within the creative content, and the built and natural elements of the environment. This chapter explores notions of social encounters and content sharing in an urban village by analysing three different types of texts: the design of the built environment; content produced by residents through a geospatial web application; and, print and online media produced in digital storytelling workshops.

MoBlogs, Sharing Situations, and Lived Life

This chapter considers shared encounters through blogging in the light of John Urry’s new mobilities paradigm. We review relevant literature on mobile blogging (moblogging) – blogging, pervasive image capture and sharing, moblogging and video blogging – and describe common issues with these digital content sharing practices. We then document some features of how technology affords “reflexive encounters” through the description of a blogging study involving smokers trying to quit, describing important connections between mobilities – physical, object, and communicative mobility. Finally, we present some challenges for new blogging technologies, their relevance to social encounters, and possible future directions through considering the mobile self; the new digital life document; and digital content sharing practices.

Offending Youth : Crime, Sex and Justice

Rates of female delinquency, especially for violent crimes, are increasing in most common law countries. At the same time the growth in cyber-bullying, especially among girls, appears to be a related global phenomenon. While the gender gap in delinquency is narrowing in Australia, United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, boys continue to dominate the youth who commit crime and have a virtual monopoly over sexually violent crimes. Indigenous youth continue to be vastly over-represented in the juvenile justice system in every Australian jurisdiction. The Indigenisation of delinquency is a persistent problem in other countries such as Canada and New Zealand. Young people who gather in public places are susceptible to being perceived as somehow threatening or riotous, attracting more than their share of public order policing. Professional football has been marred by repeated scandals involving sexual assault, violence and drunkenness. Given the cultural significance of footballers as role models to thousands, if not millions, of young men around the world, it is vitally important to address this problem. Offending Youth explores these key contemporary patterns of delinquency, the response to these by the juvenile justice agencies and moreover what can be done to address these problems. The book also analyses the major policy and legislative changes from the nineteenth to twenty first centuries, chiefly the shift the penal welfarism to diversion and restorative justice. Using original cases studied by Carrington twenty years ago, Offending Youth illustrates how penal welfarism criminalised young people from socially marginal backgrounds, especially Aboriginal children, children from single parent families, family-less children, state wards and young people living in poverty or in housing commission estates. A number of inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom have since established that children committed to these institutions, supposedly for their own good, experienced systemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse during their institutionalisation. The book is dedicated to the survivors of these institutions who only now are receiving official recognition of the injustices they suffered. The underlying philosophy of juvenile justice has fundamentally shifted away from penal welfarism to embrace positive policy responses to juvenile crime, such as youth conferencing, cautions, warnings, restorative justice, circle sentencing and diversion examined in the concluding chapter. Offending Youth is aimed at a broad readership including policy makers, juvenile justice professionals, youth workers, families, teachers, politicians as well as students and academics in criminology, policing, gender studies, masculinity studies, Indigenous studies, justice studies, youth studies and the sociology of youth and deviance more generally.-- [from publisher website]

Scene invariant crowd counting and crowd occupancy analysis

In public places, crowd size may be an indicator of congestion, delay, instability, or of abnormal events, such as a fight, riot or emergency. Crowd related information can also provide important business intelligence such as the distribution of people throughout spaces, throughput rates, and local densities. A major drawback of many crowd counting approaches is their reliance on large numbers of holistic features, training data requirements of hundreds or thousands of frames per camera, and that each camera must be trained separately. This makes deployment in large multi-camera environments such as shopping centres very costly and difficult. In this chapter, we present a novel scene-invariant crowd counting algorithm that uses local features to monitor crowd size. The use of local features allows the proposed algorithm to calculate local occupancy statistics, scale to conditions which are unseen in the training data, and be trained on significantly less data. Scene invariance is achieved through the use of camera calibration, allowing the system to be trained on one or more viewpoints and then deployed on any number of new cameras for testing without further training. A pre-trained system could then be used as a ‘turn-key’ solution for crowd counting across a wide range of environments, eliminating many of the costly barriers to deployment which currently exist.

No cure for curiosity: Linking physical and digital urban layers

Although mobile phones are often used in public urban places to interact with one’s geographically dispersed social circle, they can also facilitate interactions with people in the same public urban space. The PlaceTagz study investigates how physical artefacts in public urban places can be utilised and combined with mobile phone technologies to facilitate interactions. Printed on stickers, PlaceTagz are QR codes linking to a digital message board enabling collocated users to interact with each other over time resulting in a place-based digital memory. This exploratory project set out to investigate if and how PlaceTagz are used by urban dwellers in a real world deployment. We present findings from analysing content received through PlaceTagz and interview data from application users. QR codes, which do not contain any contextual information, piqued the curiosity of users wondering about the embedded link’s destination and provoked comments in regards to people, place and technology.

Integrating ICT into the planning process : impacts, opportunities and challenges

Mobile telecommunications have become a key lifestyle and technological trend of the twenty first century. In the context of increased urbanism and pressure on cites for citizen engagement for the purpose of creating good public places the potential of these technologies raises critical questions for planning professionals. Even though technology has become integral to all functions within our urban environment, little is known about perceptions and relationship between urban planners and the ubiquitous, ever-present digital layer of urban data and information. This paper explores this issue, via three focus groups and an additional follow-up interview with planners from local and state government, education and private sector. This paper explores the issues of integrating information and communication technologies into planning practice and the affordances that these technologies offer for community consultation and placemaking.

Write vs. type : tangible and situated media for situated engagement

Digital media is often criticised for being intangible, transient and ephemeral. These characteristics limit the provision of long-lasting social experiences, as it is through the use of all our senses that we attach meaning to space, creating a sense of place. This paper presents a comparative study of the affordances of two design interventions, one tangible paper-based, called Print + Talk = Love (PTL), the other digital screen-based, called Discussions in Space (DIS). The emphasis is on a) how tangible media, such as paper, provides different and meaningful collective experiences, and b) how it can stand on its own as an interactive design intervention and as a comprehensive data-gathering tool in urban public places. By positioning PTL and DIS within the context of urban public places and testing their abilities to engage participants, we examine their particular situated engagement abilities through a mixed method approach. As a result, the digital aspects of DIS, e.g., using Twitter, extend the situated experience beyond the actual location of the intervention. Moreover, informing a hybrid approach, we also found that the physical aspects of PTL and its tangible presence, kept the user experience focused on the actual place and event surrounding the intervention.

Detecting anomalous events at railway level crossings

Collisions between pedestrians and vehicles continue to be a major problem throughout the world. Pedestrians trying to cross roads and railway tracks without any caution are often highly susceptible to collisions with vehicles and trains. Continuous financial, human and other losses have prompted transport related organizations to come up with various solutions addressing this issue. However, the quest for new and significant improvements in this area is still ongoing. This work addresses this issue by building a general framework using computer vision techniques to automatically monitor pedestrian movements in such high-risk areas to enable better analysis of activity, and the creation of future alerting strategies. As a result of rapid development in the electronics and semi-conductor industry there is extensive deployment of CCTV cameras in public places to capture video footage. This footage can then be used to analyse crowd activities in those particular places. This work seeks to identify the abnormal behaviour of individuals in video footage. In this work we propose using a Semi-2D Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Full-2D HMM and Spatial HMM to model the normal activities of people. The outliers of the model (i.e. those observations with insufficient likelihood) are identified as abnormal activities. Location features, flow features and optical flow textures are used as the features for the model. The proposed approaches are evaluated using the publicly available UCSD datasets, and we demonstrate improved performance using a Semi-2D Hidden Markov Model compared to other state of the art methods. Further we illustrate how our proposed methods can be applied to detect anomalous events at rail level crossings.

A qualitative exploration of young women's drinking experiences and associated protective behaviours

While initial research supports the effectiveness of protective strategies in mitigating young people’s alcohol-related harm, few studies have investigated these behaviours from a uniquely female perspective. Yet, young women consume alcohol within a social context that is distinctly different from that of young men and face risks that are specific to their gender. To explore a group of young Australian women’s experiences, perceptions of risks and use of protective strategies in relation to drinking in public places, we conducted either focus groups or one-on-one telephone interviews with a total of 40 women aged 18–24 years. While young women reported substantial risks associated with drinking, they also reported using a range of protective behaviours that moderated the adverse effects of alcohol, with most of these strategies being derived from the friendship group to which the women belonged. Our findings add to the limited body of knowledge on women’s insights into, and their use of protective strategies to minimise the negative consequences of alcohol.

Rural masculinities and the internalisation of violence in agricultural communities

This article is based on research we conducted in two agricultural communities as part of a broader study that included mining communities in rural Australia. The data from the agricultural locations tell a different story to that of the mining communities. In the latter, alcohol-fuelled, male-on-male assaults in public places caused considerable anxiety among informants. By contrast, people in the agricultural communities seemed more troubled by hidden violent harms which were largely privatised and individualised, including self-harm, suicide, isolation and threats to men’s general wellbeing and mental health; domestic violence; and other forms of violence largely unreported and thus unacknowledged within the wider community (including sexual assault and bullying linked to homophobia). We argue one reason for the different pattern in the agricultural communities is the decline of pub(lic) masculinity, and with this, the increasing isolation of rural men and the increasing propensity to internalise violence. We argue that the relatively high rates of suicide in agricultural communities experiencing rural decline are symptomatic of the internalisation of violence.

Networked identity work as project development among co-creative communities

Networked identity work is the conscious negotiation or co-creation of identity, enacted by speaking and listening across differences among multiple publics, including those real and imagined, familiar and unknown, on and offline, present and future. It is a concept I explore extensively in research with queer Digital Storytellers who share their personal stories in public places to catalyse social change (Vivienne 2013). In this article I consider distinctions between ‘story’ and ‘identity’; ‘networking’ and ‘networked identity work’ and argue that the two concepts may be usefully employed in development of co-creative community projects. Finally I consider how variable definitions of co-creativity influence project development.

Ruptured relations : guerrilla theatre, time & Pranksterish disability performance practice

Guerrilla theatre tends, by its very definition, to pop up unpredictably – it interrupts what people might see as the proper or typical flow of time, place and space. The subversive tenor of such work means that questions about ‘what has happened’ tend to the decidedly less polite form of ‘WTF’ as passersby struggle to make sense of, and move on from, moments in which accustomed narratives of action and interaction no longer apply. In this paper I examine examples of guerrilla theatre by performers with disabilities in terms of these ruptures in time, and the way they prompt reflection, reconfigure relations, or recede into traditional relations again - focusing particularly on comedian Laurence Clark. Many performers with disabilities – Bill Shannon, Katherine Araniello, Aaron Williamson, Ju Gosling, and others – find guerrilla-style interventions in public places apposite to their aesthetic and political agendas. They prompt passersby to reflect on their relationship to people with disabilities. They can be recorded for later dissection and display, teaching people something about the way social performers, social spectators and society as a whole deal with disability. In this paper, as I unpack Clark's work, I note that the embarrassment that characterises these encounters can be a flag of an ethical process taking place for passersby. Caught between two moments in which time, roles and relationships suddenly fail to flow along the smooth routes of socially determined habits, passersbys’ frowns, gasps and giggles flag difficulties dealing with questions about their attitude to disabled people they do not now know how to answer. I consider the productivity, politics and performerly ethics of drawing passersby into such a process – a chaotic, challenging interstitial time in which a passersbys choices become fodder for public consumption – in such a wholly public way.

Maintaining the ethic of service [Editorial]

This issue of Precedent is concerned with professional legal ethics. ln my view, professional ethics are rules about how you do your job, based on moral principles. By virtue of the nature of the work they do, the reputation of the institution through which they are admitted to practice (the court), and the consequences that can flow if they act inappropriately or incompetently, lawyers are under constant scrutiny in all aspects of their lives. Errors, omissions or misdeeds in both their professional and their personal lives have the potential to damage them, their clients, the profession itself and the court. We ought never to take for granted the trust the public places in us to preserve the integrity of the legal system itself, especially in times when that system may be under threat, either from without or from within.