Fostering large display engagement through playful interactions

Challenges confronting designers of public displays include display blindness, i.e. the propensity of people to ignore these displays as they become ever-more ubiquitous, and the "first click" problem, i.e. users not interacting with these displays due to being unaware of interactive content. To address the challenge of display blindness, explicit and tacit mechanisms for interacting with displays have been explored. Unfortunately, because of the short-term nature of many installations, it has been difficult both to assess the relative effects of different interventions because of limited statistical power and to assess the relative effects of different interventions due to display blindness because the short-term nature of deployment limits the onset of display blindness. We explore two simple whole body (non-touch) interactions with a public display, one a user skeleton and the second a simple game, to explore their relative efficacy at capturing passers-by attention and at keeping passers-by engaged. We demonstrate the complimentary benefits of user-shadowing and playful tasks as a mechanism to both capture and keep in the context of public deployments.