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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