Supporting Extensible Public Display Systems with Speakeasy

Abstract

A digital public display system must have the utmost modularity and flexibility. Users must be able to display and interact with any media type on the display, and must also be able to connect to and control a variety of devices from the display. Further, because these systems must be able to adapt to their users over time, public display systems will need to be able to support new media types, devices, and services without additional development work. Speakeasy is a foundational platform that can provide such ad hoc communication, and enable interaction among devices with little to no a priori knowledge of one another. To explore this platform and the foundation that it provides for a public display system, we developed two digital public displays atop the Speakeasy architecture: a text-based tickertape LED display and a large-format graphical display. In the course of this chapter, we discuss the Speakeasy architecture as well as the development process of these two displays.