Toward Meaningful Engagement with Pervasive Displays

Despite the growing literature on public displays, there have been only a few initiatives to clearly map the various obstacles to sustained and meaningful participation with this type of technology, especially outside laboratory environments. These obstacles undermine the potential of public displays for sustainable engagement with users after the initial novelty effect has worn off. In this article, the authors discuss several case studies that frame four of these obstacles: interaction blindness, motives for participation, input modalities, and the ability to find applications on displays. They describe empirically tested solutions to these problems and discuss the tradeoffs that arise in longitudinal large-scale deployments. This article is part of a special issue on pervasive displays.