Regarding the evolution of printed materials in interactive and electronic

Problems

Imagine how much paper and ink it takes to print all those emails that people send to each other every day. I only have about three thousand incoming emails in one of the mailboxes. In addition to saving paper, emails are also good because they reach the recipient instantly, there is the ability to search, you can attach photos, videos, documents. Of course, now it's all pretty obvious. And it is unlikely that mankind will come to the head, suddenly refuse emails back in favor of paper.

What happens in other areas of print activities? Newspapers, magazines and books are still printed, whereas there are mobile and web counterparts. If you think about it, in the modern reality, common sense in this process is not enough: to print the circulation, distribute it, then store it, or recycle it, print it again. Just transfer time and resources. When the same final effect - “read”, can be obtained from the device screen. But let's leave this trend to the giants of industry, such as Amazon.

Quite annoying for many is the atavism of modern life - these are forms and forms in various state institutions. Fill, fix, refill, run for signatures and seals ... When it could be just an online profile with auto-fill fields, prompts and the same online verification system from the state. structures. Most likely, someone is already working on a large-scale solution to this issue, and it is worth hoping for an early result.

Decision

The direction in which my personal efforts are made is the neutralization of public information and advertising printed materials (posters, posters, leaflets), by replacing it with ordinary and touch screens. Such a task in perspective. And in the nearest approximation, the task is to create a convenient, scalable software platform that would:
• brought all sorts of multimedia content to the screen
• defined methods of user interaction with content in the case of a touch screen
• allowed to create the necessary type of content output, manage content and customize interactions
• made monitoring, allowed to receive statistics
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I work on the creation of such a platform as part of my own startup InfoVizum, located on vcstart.

Analogies of the solution from the web world - WordPress, from the mobile world - application designers.

Of course, it is worth noting that now there is an industry of "digital signage" (digital signage). But it developed separately, and not as a direct replacement of printed materials. Also, support for touch-screens only at the embryonic level. The classic “digital signboard” is a screen divided into several areas, where slides, creeping lines, commercials or simply television are displayed.
My solution involves the output of information in a more consistent, classic form, similar to posters, posters, modern "landing" sites.

Little about the process

Designer in the usual way creates a poster or interface in a convenient environment, such as Photoshop. In a couple of clicks, the result is exported to images for uploading to the InfoVizum management system. Next - setting how content will be played, whether any elements will react to touch and how. After the project is published on the screens in the system.

In essence, “publishing” is the automatic copying of content files to any synchronization service (DropBox, OneDrive, Torrent Sync, a shared folder on the network). And the player (connected to the same cloud storage with its software end, and to the screen - with the hardware one), finding new files, displays them on the screen in the installed form.

The player works at this stage on Windows, respectively, the content playback software can be run on any PC, and also as a “screen saver”.

Playback examples

1. Animated poster:



2. Information interface for the hotel:



3. "Board news and notes" in the office of the company:



Content Management System Interface:



The project is under development. The software product is ready to use, although in the presence of, perhaps, only 25% of the conceived functionality.