Experiences from developing networked public display applications on 3rd party infrastructures

Real-world living labs and test-beds for deployments of networked public display applications are proliferating. This offers new opportunities for researchers and application developers as they do not need to build their own infrastructure, but can instead deploy their applications on existing ones. However, most of the literature on application development and deployment of networked public display applications "in the wild" reports on deployments on own infrastructure and in own settings and do not discuss challenges on developing and deploying applications on 3rd party infrastructures. In this paper we report on experiences from two different collaborations between a team involved as application developers and a team involved as infrastructure owners. We report on the settings, infrastructure, and overall application development process. We reflect on the two experiences and discuss challenges for future researchers and developers of networked public display applications that aim at deploying them on existing 3rd party infrastructures.