David W. Dunlap/The New York TimesOn the subway kiosks designed by Control Group, travelers can touch two points and watch a route unfold; in this case, from Union Square to Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens.Coming this summer to as many as 120 screens around New York City: "On the Go!"
How the city looks and feels -- and why it got that way.
David W. Dunlap/The New York TimesColin O'Donnell, chief operations officer of Control Group, at a prototype.Thrill to your own personal journey underground, as bright ribbons of color snake through the boroughs, showing you how to get from here to there on the subway. Marvel as Gordian knots of "police investigations" and "earlier incidents" are cut by service updates. Then -- submit to the commercial messages.
Dozens of 6-foot-4-inch stainless-steel kiosks are to be installed in 16 subway stations in the next few months in what the Metropolitan Transportation Authority calls its "On the Go!" program. They will replace some of the poster-size paper maps on platforms, mezzanines and turnstile areas, and also cut down on notices that sometimes proliferate to the point that they look like wallpaper.
Each kiosk will have an interactive display screen, measuring 46 inches diagonally, that can help riders navigate the system. The kiosks will also inaugurate a new kind of luminous, kinetic advertising that will be hard to avoid and almost impossible to ignore. Straphangers waiting for trains to arrive will be pretty much captive audiences. Who knows, though? Deep in commuting tedium, they may welcome a few minutes of diverting commercial video.
In any case, it will be possible to stop the ads with a single tap on the screen by anyone who wants to consult a map or service bulletin.
"Above all else, the screens are a customer communications device," said Paul J. Fleuranges, the senior director of corporate and internal communications at the authority, "so customers have to have at their disposal maps, service status, trip planning and other services that are just a tap away."
The kiosks are being produced by Antenna Design, which also designed the MetroCard vending machines and the R142 and R142a subway cars. Thirty will be programmed by CBS Outdoor, which already controls subway advertising under a 10-year contract with the authority. Between 47 and 90 kiosks will be programmed by Control Group, a young and growing technology firm.
David W. Dunlap/The New York TimesThis is not an actual ad, but an example of the kind of advertiser that might appear on the kiosks. The service bar at the top of the screen will always be visible and the ad can be stopped with a tap on the screen.As licensees of the transportation agency, CBS Outdoor and Control Group are to purchase the kiosks from Antenna for about $15,000 each and furnish the software and programming. They will deliver the kiosks to the authority, which will own, install and maintain them, and supply power and data to them. Until the companies recoup their cash investment, they will be entitled to 90 percent of gross advertising receipts generated by the kiosks. The other 10 percent will go to New York City Transit.
The fact that the licensees depend on ad revenue to get paid means there is a strong incentive to install the kiosks soon, said Damian Gutierrez, a senior project manager at Control Group.
The licenses will run only through 2015 because "On the Go!" is still considered a pilot program. Mr. Fleuranges said the overall cost had not been determined. "We hope the revenue from these screens will help defray those costs," he added.
Prototype kiosks were installed in 2011 at five locations. "Not all customers understood that the screen was interactive," Mr. Fleuranges said. "There seemed to be a demographic split. Where a younger customer would walk up to the screen and intuitively begin to interact with it, older, more mature customers -- so to speak -- didn't have that intuitive reaction. So, we want the licensees to improve on that digital customer experience."
And if the customer's experience is frustrating enough to induce an attack on the kiosk? "The glass is almost bulletproof," said Colin O'Donnell, the chief operations officer and a co-founder of Control Group. The whole kiosk, screen and all, can be power washed. The cooling system is entirely self-contained, so contaminants theoretically cannot gum up the inner works.
David W. Dunlap/The New York TimesMr. O'Donnell pulled the map down to show how the uppermost sections could be reached by a child or someone in a wheelchair.You won't have to touch the screen with your bare fingers if you'd rather not, especially in cold and flu season. A pen or a knuckle or a lipstick tube will do. The screen has peripheral sensors that determine where a tap against the glass occurred -- and therefore what the user intended -- by measuring waves of energy given off by the tap.
On the screen of the prototype kiosk at his office in the Woolworth Building, Mr. O'Donnell called up a subway map. It looked fairly ordinary until he tapped 14th Street-Union Square. A lozenge-shaped label appeared over the station. The map dimmed. He tapped Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard. A "Q" appeared in the label and a bright yellow line (for N, Q, and R trains) began climbing through Manhattan and Queens. The label at the end declared: "29 minutes, 15 stops."
Mr. O'Donnell did something else impressive with the map. He dragged it down the screen so low that the uppermost areas of Manhattan and the Bronx would have been within easy reach of a child or someone in a wheelchair.
Even veteran straphangers can use a little help sometimes, particularly during emergency interruptions, when the usual trains aren't running and decisions have to be made about alternate routes. "If I had the ability to make those decisions, I wouldn't be late for meetings," Mr. Gutierrez said. Mr. O'Donnell arched his eyebrow ever so slightly. "Sure," he said.
