Pervasive displays in the wild: Employing end user programming in adaption and re-purposing

The declining hardware cost has enabled the wide spread of Pervasive Displays anywhere within urban spaces; these systems are composed of displays of various sizes and allow users to interact with the same public screens simultaneously, usually through new and engaging modalities, e.g. Tangible Interaction. Yet the frequent changes in users’ needs dictate a continuous adaption and re-purposing of such systems with new and focused features, in order to prevent interest to wear off and overcome people’s low expectations of their content value; currently this process has to be done by site managers, and this tedious and necessary task prevented long-term deployments. In this paper we propose to use End User Programming to empower users with the ability to adapt Pervasive Displays to their continuously evolving requirements. We conducted a preliminary study involving university students, gathering scenario’s requirements and initial feedback on a prototype we developed. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.