A New Kind of Interaction

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DS EUROPE spoke to Ian Wilson, Emotion AI, about the latest interactivity for digital signage.
 
When those in the digital signage industry talk about interactivity, they usually mean a touch-based kind of interactivity. Various technological efforts over the past years have focused on delivering this kind of interactivity on screens in a whole multitude of different sizes, shapes and materials. Through touch-enabled digital signage, one can guarantee that the user is engaging with the content on the screen because they actually interact with it. However, getting the users to look at the screen in the first place remains a problem for the digital signage industry, and if people don’t look at it, then no message can be delivered and the screen might as well not be there.
 
Well-designed, eye-catching content is, of course, one way to draw attention to a screen and get an audience for the content. One innovative company in Cambridge, UK, however, suggests that using innate human response mechanisms to catch people’s eyes might be a better approach.
 
Emotion AI have built up their portfolio in animated gaming applications, like characters for virtual worlds and multiplayer games, but they are now looking to address the digital signage market. Character animation is something almost indigenous in gaming applications, but, when done by hand, it is a very costly and laborious process. With Emotion AI’s technology, the gestures and facial expressions of these digital characters are generated automatically in real time through algorithms, so personalised character animation is possible in real time. This has a number of benefits – reducing development and content creation costs, saving time and increasing productivity – as well as making this kind of character personalisation very interesting for the digital signage world as a means of engaging their audience in real-time.
Emotion AI want to solve the problem of people not paying attention to digital signage by creating realistic characters that draw attention to the sign by playing on the innate human response to having someone watching you. You’ll have noticed yourself that if you feel as though someone is watching you, you’ll turn around to see who it is – this technology exploits just this impulse. Humans register small movements in their peripheral vision and will turn to see what it is. Social conventions mean that people are very loath to ignore people actively (even when it’s someone trying to sell you something!), so they will turn to acknowledge the other person.
 
Using a camera attached to the screen, software can track a person’s location in the area around the screen. Features like the position of the nose can be used to identify which way the person is looking, and then the angle between the character’s eyes and the audience’s eyes can be calculated. The character would then turn towards them, gesture and make eye contact with them, and attention would be engaged, and the message delivery can take place.
 
Once the audience is engaged, the character can interact and respond to the audience in real time, bridging the gap between virtual and real communication. The animation is very subtle and very detailed; breathing, blinking rate and posture all contribute to evoke the character’s state of mind, e.g. a faster rate of breathing suggests anxiety or excitement. The face alone has around 50 muscles, and for the animation to be realistic, small physiological details have to be rendered. For instance, did you know that when you smile your ears move?
When done by hand, these kinds of details are very time-consuming and costly. When the computer generates this movement, this becomes automatic and far less costly and a larger range of expressions and emotions can be conveyed. Furthermore, because this occurs in real time, expressions and gestures can be driven by events in the real world, so the character can interact with the audience and a compelling emotional and personal engagement can occur, keeping the audience’s attention.
 
Some digital signage does include the ability to target advertising to the demographics of the audience: so this character could also react in real time to the demographics and inferred personality of its audience. The personality of the character could change to match that of the audience, so that a social link would be created and the advertising would seem more relevant, because the audience would feel that they were being specifically addressed.
 
Ian Wilson outlines three key steps in any interaction with digital signage: engage, hold and deliver. At the moment, the engagement and retention of attention is often the weakest part of digital signage installations – even though before the content can deliver its message, it needs to engage its audience and keep its audience engaged. Whilst classic paper posters are being replaced with digital signage at an accelerating rate, digital signage needs to focus on finding a way in which it can emotionally interact with its audience.