Digital Signage Expo 2009 is just around the corner. Underway from the 24th to the 26th of February at the Las Vegas Convention Center, this year’s expo is as much about the exhibition floor as it is about educational sessions focusing on interactive technology, self-service and digital signage.

Opening day, February 24th, will offer expo-goers a mobile and gesture-based digital signage summit entitled “Revolutionizing Interactive Marketing in Public Places: The Mobile and Gestural Imperative”. Experts from Avenue A/Razorfish, GestureTek and our very own António Câmara (YDreams CEO) and Marta Vieira (YDreams USA’s Director of Business Development & Operations) among others, will look at big brand successful case studies, and discuss new ways to engage audiences.

António Câmara will integrate the panel of speakers kicking off the conference with Part I of Generating Brand Power with Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage, and later on in the day Marta Vieira will expand on YDreams’ experience creating interactive solutions, design limitations encountered, and overcoming those obstacles to afford audiences ‘super-experiences’ in New Content Models for Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage.

Sounds like a great line up with plenty of promising content for interactive tech enthusiasts everywhere.

Outside the Expo proper, next to one of the entrances, was the brilliant Digital Water Pavillion (DWP). Part of a future technological park project called Milla Digital (designed by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning), the DWT showcased an array of interactive water curtains.

By means of asking the pavilion’s staff, you could have a word of your choice appear written in the curtains.

Specially at night, when lighting played a big role, the effect was very unexpected, seamless and poetic (except for the “slippery when wet” yellow signs). Video here.

Find the complete credits here.

The Sub-Saharan Africa pavilion, actually an entire building that housed several countries, put on an impressive out-door show, everyday.

The entire outside wall was covered by a mosaic of 15cm square plaques. These pieces were decorated with translucent silvery vinyl and were hung from the top, as if sequins, so that they would sway with the wind creating a very convincing, and soothing, building-sized water rippling effect.

At night, though, the thing would burst into light and serve as a gigantic screen, in which the plaques acted as black-and-white pixels, each powered by a set of 4 white LEDs. Of course images could only be perceived from a relatively large distance and had a CGA-comparable pixel resolution.

Content featured a long and exciting sequence of animations and real video, intended to pass some water-related awareness message, according to those who designed it.

(Allow me to say that in front of a sun-bright thousand LEDs, environmental awareness -or any kind of awareness, for that matter- isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind. Nothing really pops into your mind. You just feel amazed, kind of happy, physically overwhelmed, and for those in the mood, a pure technological bliss.)

Video here.

Apparently, design and concept (not sure about technology) were the works of German Atelier Brueckner. Project and construction from Swiss Nussli. Both with powerful portfolios.

YDreams’ interactive installation at the Portuguese pavillion in Zaragoza’s international exhibition is drawing a lot of media and public recognition. An 18-meter wide wall projection, allows visitors to ‘grab’ words that fall from the sky directly into a Guadiana River image. The public interacts by moving their hands over the screen, selecting and watching as the words splash in mix of sound and light, amounting to a better understanding of sustainable development issues.

You can read all about it in our press release and, judging from all the comments featured in the media so far, it’s a definite highlight of the whole exhibition. Even the Portuguese Republic President, Cavaco Silva, interacted with it on the inaugural day and seemed to enjoy himself.

And please do check João Vitória’s, our Zaragoza project manager and in-house illusionist, interview to SIC tv channel, which you can find right here.

“Now watch closely as I make your logo disappear!” João Vitória, Project Manager at YDreams, offering to use his incredible magical skills to make SIC’s logo disappear into thin air.