Supporting design, prototyping, and evaluation of public display systems

Public displays have become ubiquitous in urban areas. They can efficiently deliver information to many people and increasingly also provide means for interaction. Designing, developing, and testing such systems can be challenging, particularly if a system consists of many displays in multiple locations. Deployment is costly and contextual factors such as placement within and interaction with the environment can have a major impact on the success of such systems. In this paper we propose a new prototyping and evaluation method for public display systems (PDS) that integrates augmented panoramic imagery and a light-weight, graph-based model to simulate PDS. Our approach facilitates low-effort, rapid design of interactive PDS and their evaluation. We describe a prototypical implementation and present an initial assessment based on a comparison with existing methods, our own experiences, and an example case study.