Display Joy

Over a dozen pre-built apps
Boot the app and claim your display via claim code
Claim on the web
Edit your Existing Slide
Choose from 50+ News Sources
Upload & Edit Images from Anywhere
Image Content
Social Media Feed (Twitter)

Summary Video

Hackathon presentation, includes a technical overview and overview of how different parts of the project work together. I speak a bit slowly so you can speed playback up to 1.5x if you like.

Inspiration

We took a trip to Japan, and Digital Signage was everywhere!

People use digital signage to interact with visitors, display community information, advertise, display menu boards, and social media content. It's great!

So, our team wanted to put together a TV display ourselves, of the latest coverage and maps, during Typhoon Hagibis.

Android TV is a great platform for this. Instead of using some complicated hardware and programming it by plugging it in to your PC, we thought it'd be cool to create an app, and just manage it via the web instead.

So, we put together a drag-and-drop editor to create and deploy digital signage on Android TV & Chromecast devices, and created a few small apps to display social media, news, and weather on the signage, alongside web, video, and image content.

We even ended up integrating the DesignBold app, which lets you easily create and design image content and upload it to your display.

Pitch

Display Joy makes setting up digital signage in your business or office as simple as creating a PowerPoint presentation. Using a drag-and-drop editor, you can connect a TV and get started in minutes.

Save money vs. digital signage hardware, using any TV and any Smart TV device.

Display Joy currently supports:

Images
Video (via Youtube)
Web-based content (any sharable URL)
News from 50+ sources
DIY Image creator (for non-designers)
Social Media Content (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook business reviews)
Weather

See it in action!

Recording of end-to-end setup process

Recording of Demo Display

Editor (gif)

Display Joy Editor

Design Bold Image Editor (gif)

Design Bold Editor

Hands-on Demos

Demo Display:

https://app.displayjoy.com/wrapper.html?key=stretcharriveelement

Editor / Builder Demo:

https://admin.displayjoy.com/signin.html?email=yc@meetingroom365.com&password=fooallbars

(Just click the link, no need to create an account to sign in!)

How we built it

Our tech stack is Javascript (frontend), Node (backend), Cordova (for the display app), and Flutter (Android TV App).

Challenges we ran into

TV Scaling and performance: 4k TVs are cheap, but most 4k hardware can't actually render a web page super well at 4k, so most things performed more smoothly scaled to 1080p.

Another challenge was getting Youtube video to play back & detect the end of a video, and loop seamlessly.

What we learned

Learned a lot about the Android TV publication process / app requirements. Lots of little details to figure out to get into a testing workflow, like setting up hardware, and testing debug builds quickly.

There's also a ton of little details for setting up TV displays, like rotating the display (it's easier to do this in software than to try and figure out TV settings on the fly), and scaling / performance issues.

What's next for Display Joy

We want to explore building distribution APKs for Android TV and Fire TV, and publishing these to the app store, along with some guides / instructions on how to set things up.