Under the avalanche of gadget news at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show was a legitimate story: Interactive signage is stepping out of sci-fi and into marketing
plans. Two California-based companies — TYZX, a 3-D imaging operation out of Menlo Park, and Reactrix, a point-of sale display company hailing from Redwood City — were demonstrating an
interactive system running on a Samsung display. The system uses a 3-D camera mounted in a hidden fixture on top of a flat panel. The camera captures and encodes a viewer’s movements, gestures
and (eventually) speech. And then transfers that information to processors that can then manipulate the image on the screen. Remember the futuristic ads that Tom Cruise ran by in the creepy thriller
Minority Report? It’s a very simple version of that, but without the robotic spiders that hunt you down — so far.
While the technology is very much
at the entry level — basically the viewer’s outline and movements can be captured on the screen — it would be easy to imagine, say, a pasta and pizza place creating an interactive ad
running on a screen in a high-traffic mall. Called the Reactrix WAVEscape, the system is very much a protoype. But it was obvious, even at this stage, that with even a little bit of tender loving
marketing, the technology could easily find a place in a kiosk, in-store shopping network or similar point of sale retail marketing placement.