Fueled by falling display hardware costs and rising demand, digital signage and pervasive displays are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Such systems have traditionally been used for advertising and information dissemination, with digital signage commonplace in shopping malls, airports and public spaces. While advertising and broadcasting announcements remain important applications, developments in sensing and interaction technologies are enabling entirely new classes of display applications that tailor content to the situation and audience of the display. As a result, signage systems are beginning to transition from simple broadcast systems to rich platforms for communication and interaction. In this lecture, we provide an introduction to this emerging field for researchers and practitioners interested in creating state-of-the-art pervasive display systems. We begin by describing the history of pervasive display research, providing illustrations of key systems, from pioneering work on supporting collaboration to contemporary systems designed for personalized information delivery. We then consider what the near future might hold for display networks -- describing a series of compelling applications that are being postulated for future display networks. Creating such systems raises a wide range of challenges and requires designers to make a series of important trade-offs. We dedicate four chapters to key aspects of pervasive display design: audience engagement, display interaction, system software, and system evaluation. These chapters provide an overview of current thinking in each area. Finally, we present a series of case studies of display systems and our concluding remarks.

This lecture provides an introduction to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a technology enabling automatic identification of objects at a distance without requiring line-of-sight. Electronic tagging can be divided into technologies that have a power source (active tags), and those that are powered by the tag interrogation signal (passive tags); the focus here is on passive tags. An overview of the principles of the technology divides passive tags into devices that use either near field or far field coupling to communicate with a tag reader. The strengths and weaknesses of the approaches are considered, along with the standards that have been put in place by ISO and EPCGlobal to promote interoperability and the ubiquitous adoption of the technology. A section of the lecture has been dedicated to the principles of reading co-located tags, as this represents a significant challenge for a technology that may one day be able to automatically identify all of the items in your shopping cart in a just few seconds. In fact, RFID applications are already quite extensive and this lecture classifies the primary uses. Some variants of modern RFID can also be integrated with sensors enabling the technology to be extended to measure parameters in the local environment, such as temperature & pressure. The uses and applications of RFID sensors are further described and classified. Later we examine important lessons surrounding the deployment of RFID for the Wal-Mart and the Metro AG store experiences, along with deployments in some more exploratory settings. Extensions of RFID that make use of read/write memory integrated with the tag are also discussed, in particular looking at novel near term opportunities. Privacy and social implications surrounding the use of RFID inspire recurring debates whenever there is discussion of large scale deployment; we examine the pros and cons of the issues and approaches for mitigating the problems. Finally, the remaining challenges of RFID are considered and we look to the future possibilities for the technology.