By Jennifer Davis
Vice President of Marketing, Planar Systems and RUNCO International

I have had an iWatch for several months now and have enjoyed using it for messaging notifications, calling an Uber car, making purchases, capturing ideas into Evernote or accessing boarding passes. I have found the health monitoring and alerts uncompelling and the apps too limited, but all in all, it has been a great experiment and it gives me a lot of hope for the promise of wearable technologies.

So, what are the implications of wearables for digital signage and place-based messaging, advertising, or visualization applications where larger displays and video walls are used today? I think the technologies are very complementary.

Watches and wearables are first and foremost instruments. Measurement devices that can be used to monitor and track individually. Secondarily, they take messages from the world and put them on a human scale at an ultimate level of personalization.

Digital displays, especially those in public space, take messages to the world and although they increasingly can be instrumented for measurement of ROI and audience engagement, they are generally designed for more than one person at a time. The combination can be very powerful. Using geofencing or similar technologies, the combination of mobile, wearable and digital signage technologies can be used to bring the mass message down to the individual and vice versa.

And with the advent of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, which used to be discreet objects or devices, is now becoming a seamless layer on top of the space. What people call calm technology, ubiquitous computing and the all-digital-all-the-time movement that is already having an impact on our world.

This blog was reprinted with permission from InfoComm International and originally appeared here.