DIGITAL SIGNAGE DISPLAY

• US 20090198823A1
• Filed: 02/07/2008
• Published: 08/06/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/04/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Omnivex Corporation
• Original Assignee: Omnivex Corporation
• Inventors: Chu, William, Kayes, Scott, Bannister, Doug, Underwood, Doug, Easthope, Nick, Dalley, Rick, Collard, Andrew
• Granted Patent: US 9,374,558 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/230
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/1859 adapted to provide push services, e.g. data channels
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/55 Push-based network services
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4312 involving specific graphical features, e.g. screen layout, special fonts or colors, blinking icons, highlights or animations
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4314 for fitting data in a restricted space on the screen, e.g. EPG data in a rectangular grid
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4331 Caching operations, e.g. of an advertisement for later insertion during playback
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/6543 for forcing some client operations, e.g. recording remote booting in general G06F9/4416
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/812 involving advertisement data advertising per se G06Q30/02
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 7/165 Centralised control of user terminal subsequent to an upstream request signal H04N7/17345; Registering at central by two-way working H04N7/17309

Abstract

A digital signage network employs a common data model and a subscription system to disseminate data gathered from a plurality of data sources to a number of displays. The network nodes interact with each other as content sources, content consumers, or both, with some systems acting as consumers to upstream sources and acting as sources to downstream consumers. The presentation of the data on a digital signage display allows for real-time binding of live data to provide a rich display effect.

Claims

1. A method of displaying information on a digital signage display comprising:

receiving content;

building a plurality of layers in accordance with the received content;

overlaying at least two of the plurality of layers; and

flattening and rendering the layers to the digital signage display

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the received content includes a template defining a structure for the plurality of layers.

3. The method of claim 2 wherein the at least two layers are overlaid in a manner defined by the template.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the rendering of the layers is performed by a plurality of processors.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein each layer is rendered by a rendering thread on one of the plurality of processors.

6. The method of claim 4, wherein at least two of the plurality of processors reside in one processor package.

7. The method of claim 1 further including the step of binding live data to at least one of the layers prior to flattening and rendering the layers.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of receiving content includes receiving a plurality of different types of content.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein each of the different types of content are received in a common data model.

10. The method of claim 8, wherein the types of content are selected from a list including:

temperature values, weather forecasts, video files, video streams, still photos, inventory levels, room availability and production levels.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the content is received from a plurality of sources.

12. A digital signage system for displaying digital content, the system comprising:

a display for displaying content;

a receive queue for receiving and queuing content from an external source;

a layout processor for ordering the queued content into layers; and

a rendering engine for rendering the layers created by the layout processor to the display.

13. The signage system of claim 12 wherein the layout processor includes a content formatting engine for modifying content appearance in a layer in accordance with other received content.

14. The signage system of claim 12 further including a transmit queue for queuing data from the display for transmission.

15. The signage system of claim 14 further including a network interface for receiving data from a network and placing the received network data in the receive queue and for transmitting data stored in the transmit queue to the network.

16. The signage system of claim 12 wherein the receive queue, the layout processor and the rendering engine are implemented on a general purpose computer.

17. The signage system of claim 16 wherein the general purpose computer transmits the rendered layers to the display through a screensaver application.

18. The signage system of claim 12 wherein the rendering engine includes a graphics processor unit for controlling the display to display the rendered layers.