News

New Ventures provides support to touchscreen company

May 4, 2004

Davenport,IA-Imagine shoppers walking up to a storefront at a Quad-City mall and touching the window to get information about sale items. If they touched another point on the window a virtual model wearing the store's merchandise might appear.

The futuristic approach to interactive advertising may not be as far into the future as it sounds according to an article in the Quad-City Times. 

Silver Beacon Media LLC, a reseller of innovative touchscreen displays is gearing up for the futuristic approach to interactive advertising with the help of the NewVentures Initiative. 

Silver Beacon will be marketing the hardware and software, maintaining the systems it sells and consulting on uses for Dynamic Digital Neworks, or DDN. Silver Beacon's will use touchscreen systems developed by NextWindow of New Zealand.

Silver Beacon president Mark Christenson said the NextWindow interactive screens are an improvement on the present touchscreen technology. Christenson said the NextWindow screens have many more applications and the company has developed a system that allows any window or glass surface to be used as a touchscreen via a rear projection unit.

Most interactive screens rely on surface-mounted sensors to determine where a person is touching the screen. However, NextWindow screens use corner-mounted lenses to determine the position of a finger pressed against the screen. The difference makes it possible to use much larger displays, including entire windows of storefronts.

"You could press on a shirts symbol on the entire window of a storefront and see shirts and models wearing them. It's really 'Minority Report' (movie) kind of stuff,' said Christenson. "When you let your mind wander, you can think of so many applications.'

Christenson said the potential for much larger touchscreens is one of the features that make the NextWindow technology different. "The size of screens being used now are limited by the technology. The bigger those types of screens are, the costs rise geometrically. That isn't the case with the NextWindow screens,' he said.

Christenson said the screens have potential for museums and zoos, arenas, transportation and for industrial uses. Companies potentially could use the interactive screens to provide employees with information in a manufacturing environment or to inform customers entering a building on the products and services available from the business.

"The employee training and information value could be huge,' said Christenson. "The systems could be used as a communications vehicle to communicate with all plants on a network.'