Supporting content scheduling on situated public displays

There is increasing interest in creating networks of situated public displays that offer novel forms of interaction and rich media content—often as work towards a vision of ubiquitous computing or ambient multimedia. In this paper, we present an infrastructure developed as part of the e-Campus project that is designed to support the coordinated scheduling of rich media content on networks of situated public displays. The design of the system was informed by an iterative process of developing, deploying and evaluating a set of three technology probes. The resulting system provides flexible support for the construction of domain-specific scheduling approaches on top of a common, domain-independent API. Using this approach, we are able to support a combination of both statically scheduled content and interactive content across multiple displays. The API provides support for transactional semantics, allowing developers of schedulers to reliably schedule content across displays in the presence of conflicts and failures without negative impact on running applications.