Some of the content/magazine demos I have seen for the iPad have been very cool, but I have always been a little bothered by how realistic they were to regularly given the unavoidably high production costs and time needed for these apps.
Google has its big developer conference today and one of the publishers trotted out to show what’s possible was Sports Illustrated, which has a very nice proof of concept on what a Web-ready and friendly magazine can look like when it is truly capable of interaction and rich media.
As the demo shows, as flagged by TechCrunch, there’s a lot of capability there. I gather from people who know a lot more technically that authoring tools for HTML5 are still pretty rough and limited, but that will most certainly change.
I mention all this because while the demo shows a magazine, it takes no great mental leap to imagine how this could be applied using interactive screens to things like store and mall directories, in-retail catalogues, in public spaces, at resorts and on and on.
It’s HTML5, so it runs leaner, is stable and is all contained within a browser. It comes with little or none of the CPU demands or licensing fuzziness of Flash, and probably so enough, nowhere near the learning curve.