The media façade toolkit: prototyping and simulating interaction with media façades

Abstract

Digital technologies are rapidly finding their way into urban spaces. One prominent example is media façades. Due to their size, visibility and their technical capabilities, they offer great potential for interaction and for becoming the future displays of public spaces. To explore their potential, researchers have recently started to develop interactive applications for various media façades. Existing development tools are mostly tailored to one specific media façade in one specific setting. They usually provide limited means to incorporate interaction by a user, and the applications developed are limited to running on only one particular media façade. In this paper, we present a flexible, generalized media façade toolkit, which is capable of mimicking arbitrary media façade installations. The toolkit is capable of running interactive applications on media façades with different form factors, sizes and technical capabilities. Furthermore, it ensures application portability between different media façades and offers the possibility of providing interactivity by enabling user input with different modalities and different interaction devices.