Month: January 2021

Categories
Digital Signages

2021 Digital Signage Display Report

A glance at the latest features in digital displays and the technology that’s behind it

by Alok Dukle

Digital Signage displays have come a long way. The good old cathode ray tube (CRT) technology for televisions, that was housed in a big box, was revolutionary at its introduction, but now practically extinct.

Over the years, of course, new digital display technologies significantly outshone it in features and cost effectiveness.

So before we venture into display technology, lets go through some features in digital displays that I came across in exhibitions, research papers and articles. These are 5 trends I saw that I particularly found interesting:

1. a. Rollable TV’s

One of the hottest innovations in televisions was showcased at CES recently – LG’s incredible rollable TV, a 65-inch OLED television that’s ‘foldable’ – it actually rolls up out of a horizontal cabinet base. When stacked in front of your bed, it is perfect to unveil and watch television, and other times can be used as a seat and music player. All in all, quite unreal – check it out below:

1. b. Rollable & foldable phones:

Rollable & foldable phones are pretty mind-blowing as well since, in a sense, they can potentially convert a phone into a tablet! Check out this video to understand this:

2. Haptics

Another interesting upcoming feature in display is called ‘haptics’.
With haptics, one can ‘feel’ the screen which creates sensations when touched.
Imagine buying a top/ shirt on Amazon: With this great feature, you could actually feel the cloth before buying it. A very interesting technology which allows the sense of ‘touch’ to be enabled on displays, in addition to visual (screen) and audio (speakers).

3. Bendy-Flexi-See-through OLED’s

LG Displays showcased a whole host of features pumped into their OLED this year – from see-through displays to bendable ones. Watch this stunning video.

The applications of see-through displays are no-doubt interesting. Almost 60% of the screen surface is see-through, so displays can effectively be used in fast food restaurant counters – wherein one can view the display as well as the person on the counter behind it. Particularly useful in the Covid-19 pandemic as well- to create a shield between customer and store personnel.

The bendable displays have an interesting application in gaming too – they create an immersive experience for games, given that the screens are bent and aligned to the way we actually see. Check out the video to understand this!

4. Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR)

This interactive virtual concierge robot is an example of AR at work, and was showcased in a recent symposium for Digital Displays. The concierge was charming, almost human-like, and interacted with customers socially about products. For example, she waved her hand to attract the attention of potential customers. She then had a social conversation and conveyed salient points about products, and answered questions along the way – just as a store personnel would do!

The assistant was actually projected on glass that can serve as a transparent glass ordinarily, and then as a projection screen for augmented reality, when required.

Given an advanced ability to interact, one can imagine the possibilities this opens up – contactless shopping, personnel-less stores, to name a few.

Many such applications around AR and VR are slowly unfolding.

5. Coloured e-ink and more

This is a display system I am particularly quite interested in – of course, best known from the Kindle displays.

They are drastically different from regular displays, and bring forth their own set of advantages. The people at E-ink rightly point out, that the technology is not meant to be a replacement for digital displays, but for paper!

Its advantages like extremely long battery life, very low power requirement, no eye strain and artistic appearance, completely disrupt the space. However, limitations like able to only display images (not videos), very low refresh rate, and so on, make it placed in a completely different segment from digital displays.

In its independent space, e-ink technology is now releasing features of enabling colour, currently at 4096 shades of colours and around 16 levels of grayscale.  Great space to keep a tab on!

Now most of the above advanced features are still not out in the mass market, since they aren’t cost-effective as yet for being adopted. However, thanks to the speed of R&D we will get there soon! 

The features, of course, are only possible thanks to advanced display technologies.  

In this next section, let’s take a look at how display technologies have evolved over time, and made the features we saw earlier possible. Here’s the evolution of display technologies:

The well-known Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)

In the year 2007, the image quality of LCD displays surpassed that of the traditional CRT TV’s. And almost immediately towards the end of the year, there was a formidable shift in the space – more LCD’s were shipped as compared to CRT’s. And over time, of course, CRT’s were rendered extinct!

LCD Screens and their evolutions

LCD’s, in order to make images visible, need a backlight. Earlier this light was in the form of CCFL’s (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) which were placed on the opposite edges of the display. This was the key technology used for many years.

However, with time, CCFL’s began getting replaced by LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes) which were more efficient than CCFL’s.

Did you know that the LED televisions we see today are basically LED backlit LCD displays? Unlike what people presume, they aren’t ‘LED televisions’ in themselves. Pure LED’s still command a premium price, but are slowly making their in-roads to the mass market.

The New Age LED’s: The era of LED, OLED, QLED and AMOLED

Outdoor displays use the pure form of LED’s, since they are generally seen from a distance and need to be bright, given the daylight. They are useful for outdoor billboards, but generally not used indoors.

OLED which stands for Organic Light emitting diode, is actually a pure LED technology for indoor displays.

Followed by QLED & AMOLED, and others, which for understanding sake, are essentially variations of the OLED.

The advantages are that they produce a much higher quality output versus previous technologies, they are brighter, require no backlighting and also produce ‘true blacks’.

The current LED’s, due to backlight, are not capable of producing deep blacks. Whereas, since OLED’s are lighted up by individual pixels, they do not produce light when off and remain totally black.

Traditional LED’s (LED backlit LCD’s) versus OLED’s

These new-age LED’s are now being adopted, and LCD is on the decline, similar to how, in fact, LCD’s had overtaken CRT’s way back in 2007.

Samsung and LG, recently, both halted their domestic production of their traditional LCD’s to focus more on these newer LED technologies.

Demand and supply of Micro LED displays. Source: IDTechEX

The Future LED’s: Micro LED’s

Micro LED’s are what many believe to be the next generation of display technology. MicroLED displays offer a wide range of additional features such as wide colour gamut, high luminance and contrast, wide view angle, transparency, seamless connection, and sensor integration capability, among others.

Most of the advanced features which are releasing now like bendable, foldable and see through displays, like we saw earlier, are thanks to this technology.

Given the possibility of sensor integration, it can also engage with audiences.

Advanced technologies like cloud, ML & AI integrated with the displays are able to create the virtual concierge that we saw earlier.

Here is a handy graph that summarizes these display technologies.

Value propositions of various display technologies. Source: IDTechEx

E-paper, of course, being in a separate segment, and as explained earlier is not included in the comparison, but is an interesting technology in itself.

So that sums up an overview of the latest trends that we see in display signages and the host of features and possibilities that it opens up.

As a result of this, I see many interesting applications of digital signages and digital displays, that will make their way through and affect industries like consumer, retail, advertising, hospitality, and more.

After all, looking fundamentally, effective communication and engagement with customers across industries will lead to a higher output.

It’s an exciting road ahead in the digital signage and digital display space and I, for one, can’t wait to experiment on prototypes and build products using these new technologies!

Sources:

Categories
Everything IoT

IoT Trends in 2021: Is IoT worth the buzz?

by Alok.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that has been turning heads since the last few years. But one needs to tread cautiously with fancy terms. Time and again, we have witnessed that they may not, unfortunately, be worth the noise and attention they get.

In this article, we take a hard look at relevant data to decide if it is worth the buzz…..

Where better to begin than with the global trend of number of connected devices, which gives a clear picture of IoT deployments globally. In fact, without looking at applications, one can just observe the chart (given below) with its year-on-year numbers, and they tell you a story.

To summarize: 21.7 billion device connections have been deployed cumulatively as in 2020.  To put it in context that’s 2.9 connected devices per person globally! (basis the latest census that estimates a ~7.5 billion world population)

One thing to note though: Every connected device is not an IoT device as per our IoT definition, which results in an important and fundamental question:

What makes an IoT device?

‘IoT Analytics’ defines the Internet of Things as a network of internet-enabled physical objects.

What basically this means is that IoT devices contain independent intelligence. The physical device is connected to a cloud and operates ‘independently’. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, are NOT IoT devices by this definition.

With 11.7 bn pure IoT devices as in 2020, the other key point that we absorb from this chart is the fact that 2020, in fact, has been a milestone year for IoT. This is because for the first time, the number of IoT devices crossed the number of non-IoT connected devices globally.

The acceleration in growth rate (from 10% between 2010 to 2020, to 13%, 2020 onwards) demonstrates the growing spurt in the sector.

So the ‘number of devices’ statistic look encouraging, but is it backed by real revenues and money invested?

For a long time, a consistent criticism to IoT has been its low maturity resulting in low or no monetization. Which means even if devices were being pumped into the ecosystem, the revenue and investments made for them was not substantial. (a business case was not immediately seen by decision makers, etc)

This seems to have taken a turn lately, which signifies maturity in certain segments: Statista boasts that the global IoT market grew from $100bn in 2017 to $212 billion to 2019, and as if that wasn’t enough, suggests it would reach $1.6 tn by 2025.worldwide. Even after rounding down the figures, that’s an estimated growth of approximately 7X in 7 years.

Business Insider is even more bullish, saying the IoT global market will grow to over $3 tn by 2026!

With number of connected devices and revenues presented, here are the sectors that are the growth drivers.

A BCG research report points out that ‘Discrete manufacturing’, ‘Logistics’ and ‘Transportation’ are key sectors for whom ‘the time has come’ with respect to IoT. In fact, 50% of the current overall spending in IoT is from these sectors.

What’s more interesting, is that with time, IoT applications will mature in other sectors like utilities, healthcare, automotive and retail. And hence the sustained year-on-year growth that we saw in the earlier charts.

But what are the end-user applications that are sustaining this growth? And what benefits are users deriving from IoT use-cases?

Based on multiple surveys and research reports,  these are the collated key benefits that we distilled out:

Transparency and Easier monitoring:
We can optimize any variable only after we can measure it by some means. One key driver that has boosted applications around IoT is its ability to give visibility to measurement. Be it temperature sensors for boilers, physical location for trucks, vital checks for patients, and more, visibility gives rise to transparency. By the virtue of ‘knowing’ the location of physical assets, organizations can create dashboards which are very handy for monitoring.

Better decisions:
The next step after monitoring is to enable better decision making. From new sets of data, one can take more informed decisions. Output can be then benchmarked against desired outcomes, be it saving costs, increasing efficiency, and so on.

Automating tasks:
One can also automate tasks by rule-based algorithms, as a result of the increased visibility. This is, of course, and extension to better decision making. Only that in this case it is automated rather than manual.

Cut energy cost:
This is a specific outcome increasingly being drawn as a result of IoT implementation, and hence has merit to give a special mention. Through sensors and automated building/ factory management, one can optimize energy costs expended by various activities on real-time data. This optimizes and hence cuts energy costs tremendously.

Predictive maintenance:
This is another area which deserves a special mention. Through sensors, one can increasingly monitor and predict when certain parts of large and complex machinery and infrastructure can fail. Doing this proactively, has found to save a tremendous amount of money and effort.

Increasing engagement:
Finally, with increasingly dynamic output, IoT devices have the ability to engage audiences with intelligent communication. This is, of course, an area we are particularly deep in, and Digital Signage Technology is a space that we see has great potential to build engagement at the point of sale.

Lest we forget, one cannot evaluate an industry in present times, without looking at the implications that the Covid pandemic would have on it.

Overall, we have seen an increase in technology adoption as a result of the pandemic since it helps remote communication and reduces physical contact/ intervention.

The IoT industry too, in the long run, is likely to be enabled as a result of the pandemic. Customers would demand remote deployments and monitoring, which means more devices deployed. However, in the short run, with certain industries largely affected, investments in new technologies may get postponed to a better day. Hence, strained in the short run but favourable in the long term, can be concluded as an outcome of the pandemic.

Finally, we check for ‘side-effects’. IoT at its core may be a boon, but the threats should not outweigh its value. The key area that needs mention here is ‘security’. Data & IT security becomes increasingly important with the many endpoints connected as part of the IT ecosystem, as they can be vulnerable to being exploited.

A Gartner report suggests that more than 25% of identified attacks in enterprises will involve IoT. Their survey indicated that 32% of IT leaders cite security as a top barrier to IoT success.

Cybersecurity is one of the biggest allied industry that will evolve and grow mature as a direct outcome of the growth in IoT. Stringent data & identity protection for assets as well as privacy laws need to be streamlined in the years ahead.

All in all, IoT seems to be worth the attention then?

With tailwinds ripe to steer growth, in the coming years, we will see IoT applications mature and mushroom across varied industries.

And as tech enthusiasts, if we do a bit of crystal ball gazing, I, for one, foresee an exciting journey ahead for us and for our IoT community.

But I leave it to you to take your call, if this is all worth the buzz. 🙂

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