Workshop Host
This is the summary of W3C's Workshop All Signs Point to the Web, held 14-15 June 2012 in Makuhari, Chiba, Japan and graciously hosted by NTT. The full Workshop minutes are also public.
Goals for the Workshop included:
- identify use cases and models for Web browser-based digital signage systems;
- find ways to better integrate of Web standards into these systems;
- refine the charter of the Web-based Signage Business Group.
More than 70 people attended from NTT group companies, Accessible Media Inc. (AMI), Canon, Digital Signage Consortium, Ericsson, ETRI, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Fujifilm, Future Web Technology, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners Inc., Hitachi, IAdea, INNES, Intel, JASPA, East Japan Marketing & Communications, Inc., KDDI, Keio University, Ministry of Internal Affiar and Communications of Japan, Mitsubishi Electric, Mitsubishi Research Institute, Nano Opt Media, NEC, Newphoria, NHK Enterprises, Opera Software, Panasonic, Panasonic Digital Communications, SMART Communications, Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Ctr. Toshiba, TTA, Yahoo! Japan and W3C.
Discussion
To collect use cases and identify requirements for next-generation Web-based digital signage services, and to identify gaps in Web technology, meeting participants discussed:
- State of the Art: State of the art (Session 2) and the Digital Signage Japan Demo Tour (Session 3)
- Use Cases and Requirements: Signs and passers-by (Session 1), Signs and users (Session 4), and Accessibility and Adaptive systems (Session 5)
- Relation to existing standards and gaps: Standards Session 6 and Next Steps (Session 7)
Key topics included:
- Privacy
- Discovery (of signs for device users and of users near the sign)
- Accessibility of information
- Delivery context (who, what, how, when, etc.)
- Security of content on sign (who is it from, is it "disaster-proof", etc.)
- Authoring and Managing content
- Second Screen Interaction (or even more screens)
- User Interaction
- Payment
Participants identified these use cases:
- Accessible Signage/Talking Signs (help for communication barriers, understanding, cognition, etc.; using Speech/Natural Language/gesture/sound processing)
- Adapting content to children, young adults, elderly, other users
- Adapting to whether there is one person or many around
- Asking a sign for make information
- Augmented Reality
- Automatic vending machine/Kiosk (to purchase something)
- Disaster information/Notice board
- Getting a coupon
- Personal recommendation
- Spot renting
- Getting the attention of the group passers-by
- (See the full minutes for more.)
Participants identified strong relationships between the state of the art digital signage implementations and these standards:
- W3C: CSS, HTML5, SMIL, SVG, Geolocation, Woff, Web Intents, WebRTC, SCXML, MMI Architecture (and all the specifications developed in the Device APIs WG and the WebApps WG)
- Other related SDOs: ITU-T, POPAI, 3GPP
Next Steps
The use cases presented above will next be sent to the W3C Web-based Signage Business Group. The group will review them and clarify gaps in the existing Web standards for making the Web the platform for next-generation digital signage services.
The Business Group is planning to hold several joint meetings with the relevant W3C groups during TPAC 2012 in Lyon, France.