WireSpring Blog

Digital Retailing Technologies for the New Year

Author: Bill Gerba on 2005-01-09 19:28:08

Since the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is always held in early January, the New Year always starts off with a flood of press releases related to cool new technologies ready to hit the marketplace.  And while much of the latest gear is primarily aimed at consumers (as the show’s name would imply), over the past few years the realms of consumer and professional technologies have overlapped a great deal, and consequently, there is much of interest to the business technology professional, especially those of us involved with digital retailing.

This year two pieces of PR were brought to my attention, and I thought I’d share them.  The first is from American Technology Corporation, the producers of some very interesting HyperSonic Sound technology.  We first encountered ATC about 18 months ago, when a customer of ours was testing their ultrasonic speakers for an in-store digital signage deployment.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this technology, it basically works like a laser for sound, creating a highly focused directional sound wave that can be heard clearly by somebody standing in the right position, but is practically silent outside of its narrow cone of influence.  The underlying technology has to do something with taking advantage of the way that sound gets distorted as it travels through the air, but the bottom line is that using these kinds of speakers, you can channel sound to specific locations without creating unwanted noise elsewhere.  So, for example, you could send cereal messages down the cereal aisle, beverage messages down the beverages aisle, and so on, without any of the sounds interfering with each other.

The other interesting piece of news I came across was from Opticality, whom, among other things, has introduced an interesting new 3D display that can be viewed from any angle without special glasses.  While I haven’t seen this particular company’s technology in action, I have seen things from companies making similar claims.  While some have been impressive, none have really struck me as something that would work well in a typical dynamic digital signage environment.  Hopefully this one will prove different, and when the opportunity presents itself for WireSpring to test one of these screens, I’ll certainly let you know.

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