The Tacita architecture was first published in 2014 (paper found here) to explore how best to provide personalisation for public digital signage without compromising the viewers’ privacy. Since then, Tacita has been built out into a fully functioning service at Lancaster University that Students, Faculty, and anyone visiting the campus can use.

The Tacita mobile client currently available on the Apple App Store for iOS devices, and supports a number of different applications to personalise the e-Campus displays around Lancaster University.

Some of the personalisation apps we support include:

With more currently in development!

Tacita builds on top of the e-Campus pervasive display testbed. Our testbed includes over 60 public displays that are deployed in place such as:

• Departmental buildings
• Student colleges
• the Library
• Community areas such as lecture theatres.

Public displays have classically just shown static content put up by the display owners. We are exploring ways for displays to show content that is more relevant to viewers, currently approaching this with three main types of personalisation:

• Walk by personalisation – changing the content as a viewer walks by a particular display
• Longitudinal personalisation – changes to the current content schedules based on context information (e.g more students during term times)
• Active personalisation – The display only showing content when the viewer specifically requests it (e.g Information touch screen)