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: Flat-screen digital graffiti boards displaying text messages and photos sent from cellphones are beginning to give the virtual world a foothold in pubs, clubs, and beyond.

For an entire generation, online friendships, conversation by text message, and instant message confessionals are the norm—and now two local companies are trying to parlay those sorts of virtual interactions into places where people actually interact face-to-face.

Aerva Inc and LocaModa Inc, both of Cambridge, have created technology that lets people use cellphones to send messages or pictures to video screens scattered around late night hot spots and other venues where people socialise. “Our premise when we started this company five years ago was screens are going to be everywhere; handsets are going to be in every pocket. It seems crazy to not have the handset interact with screen,” said Sanjay Manandhar, chief technology officer of Aerva, which powers BarCast, an interactive network of screens that have begun popping up in several dozen area bars over the past few months.

For now, interactive digital signs are a fledgling enterprise, according to Melissa Webster, programme vice-president of content and digital media technologies for IDC. The most primitive digital signs are little more than computer screens or TVs that play looping video or slides, but as new technologies allow screens to connect to the Internet, the power for advertisers and content makers expands—content can become local, user-generated, or even tailored to the crowd watching a given screen.

Aerva has focused on installing its systems in Europe, where text messaging took off much faster than in the US. But the company has been expanding its reach domestically, where the market seems ready, Manandhar said, for basic installations like screens in hospitals that can be instantly tuned to display emergency alert messages, or in high schools where teens can text answers to a sample SAT question.

Tom Ellis, a researcher at Boston University, used BarCast TV this Halloween at The Tam on Tremont Street, taking a photo of himself and his friends with his cellphone and sending it to the screen in response to a costume contest that gave him a glimpse of who was wearing what in other bars and enabling him to vote.