A new generation of public displays demands high interactive and multiscreen features to enrich people’s experience in new pervasive environments. Traditionally, research on public display interaction has involved mobile devices as the main characters during the use of personal area network technologies such as Bluetooth or NFC. However, the emergent Smart TV model arises as an interesting alternative for the implementation of a new generation of public displays. This is due to its intrinsic connection capabilities with surrounding devices like smartphones or tablets. Nonetheless, the different approaches proposed by the most important vendors are still underdeveloped to support multiscreen and interaction capabilities for modern public displays, because most of them are intended for domestic environments. This research proposes multiscreen interactive middleware for public displays, which was developed from the principles of a loosely coupled interaction model, simplicity, stability, concurrency, low latency, and the usage of open standards and technologies. Moreover, a validation prototype is proposed in one of the most interesting public display scenarios: the advertising.

This work was supported by the University of Cauca through Projects VRI 3593 “SMARTA: Modelo para el Despliegue de Publicidad en Entornos de Computación Ubicua Soportado en un Esquema de Cooperación Smart TV-Smartphone” and VRI 4045 “MANTISS: Modelo para la Adaptación de Contenidos Publicitarios en Entornos n-Screen Interactivos Soportados en un Esquema de Colaboración Smart TV-Smartphone.” Francisco Martinez is funded by Colciencias Doctoral Scholarship no. 567. Part of this work has been done at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, with partial support from the EEE project TIN2011-28308-C03-03, where Francisco Martinez-Pabon, Jaime Caicedo-Guerrero, and Jhon Jairo Ibarra-Samboni were visiting scholars in 2014.