Abhijit Sengupta
2 - 3 min
26 May 2024
Every outdoor media owner is proud of their assets. And two or three biggest attributes that they tom-tom about is the Location, Size and the Viewing Distance (VD). Of which Viewing Distance is a very important consideration, not only from saleability point of view. But on the content legibility from the farthest distance.
So how does one measure the actual VD?
There are various tools that can be used to measure VD:
1) MEASURING WHEEL: Was popular to measure road distances. And is still in use. But the problem is viewing line of the media asset (say Billboard) and the line of sight, doesn’t necessarily run through the road. Also, many assets are offset from the road and not accessible. Therefore, this does not fit the purpose.
2) GOOGLE MAP: Fairly easy and accurate. But one needs to be very accurate to pin the locations of the actual position of the site and the viewing point (likely to make mistakes while plotting the Pin).
3) MONOCULAR: Unlike Binocular, this has a single lens. If one buys a good monocular like Bushnell, it gives the most accurate readings. But it costs money.
4) MEASUREMENT RULER: Freaky idea, right? But I found it quite effective. Let’s see how it works:
After watching a sketch artist using pencil to get the proportions of monuments and large structures for his drawings, it struck me that if certain maths can be used up, it can measure the VD. And that’s how I got a maths formula into it, and bingo. It came out pretty accurate.
For the purpose one should use a Measurement Ruler instead of the pencil. You can try it out at your workplace or home, just to see if it works.
Only thing you need are two data points:
(1) Reference Dimension: Either the height or width of the wall or door or billboard that you will point towards and measure from a certain distance. Considering you intend to measure the distance from where you stand and where the wall, door, or billboard is.
(2) Length of your arm right till the thumb. How to go about it:
Extend your arm with the ruler in your hand. Lock your arms and look through your right eye. Align the top end of the billboard with the top of the ruler (i.e. 0 inch) and place the thumb on the ruler where the billboard’s bottom end. One can measure it in inches or centimetres, but please note the same unit will have to be applied to measure the length of your arm.
Herein, I have used inches as the metric for ruler measurement and the arm. The Billboard height, we know is always provided in feet in India. Hence the resultant VD will be as per the metric used for the height of the billboard, and here it is in Feet.
Next use the formula in the picture and see if it works. Here AB is the known height of the billboard, ED is the measurement on the ruler, DC is the length of the arm and BC is the total viewing distance.
Please note (1) if you are experimenting at home of office or short distances the length of the arm needs to be added into the formula and (2) reference dimensions (of the ruler and the object) should either be vertical or horizontal and cannot be interchanged.
Outdoor Advertising can be real fun!
