Who Won the 2026 Interactive Signage Contest?

By Alison Yang 1 hour ago

When we launched the second edition of the Interactive Signage Contest 2026, we had one idea in mind: What if makers could turn everyday hardware and creative ideas into practical solutions for real-world challenges?

Building on last year’s creativity and experimentation, this year we wanted to take things one step further, encouraging makers to go beyond interactive displays and build minimum viable solutions that are practical, reproducible, and ready to grow.

And our global maker community delivered! From smarter restaurant experiences and adaptive menus to accessibility tools, sustainable systems, and AI-powered interfaces, we saw how simple hardware, thoughtful design, and a little creativity could come together to solve real problems.

This year, the contest brought together 156 makers from 23 countries, with 121 qualified projects, each bringing a fresh perspective on how interactive signage can make a difference in our everyday lives.

After months of building, sharing, voting, and judging, it’s finally time to celebrate the 9 winning projects!

Let’s meet the makers who turned their ideas into real-world solutions! 🎉

1. Reachy PizzAIolo by Dan Benitah - First Prize

Reachy PizzAIolo is a conversational restaurant ordering prototype combining Reachy Mini Lite with Seeed Studio’s reTerminal E1003. Customers order by speaking naturally to Reachy, while an ordering service maintains a structured basket and updates the E1003 in real time so they can see and review what they have ordered. Once confirmed, the same order appears in an active-orders view for restaurant staff.

The project explores a different approach to interactive signage: instead of making the screen the main interface, the E1003 becomes the persistent visual companion to a conversation. The current prototype supports conversational ordering, live E1003 order review and real-time order handoff, and I have also used Reachy to take orders at an actual pizza party.

Future work includes combining touch and voice, more natural full-duplex conversation, structured ordering skills and potentially using one local AI server to provide AI services across an entire restaurant.

2. As Served — a table that shows your meal at its real size by Yuta Saito - Second Prize

As Served projects each dish onto the table at its real size, so guests see the portion before they order. Pointing and holding for three seconds places the order.

A Seeed XIAO ESP32-C3 on the XIAO Bus Servo Adapter drives the SO-101 arm that delivers the matching utensil, and a reTerminal E1002 shows the menu and order card on e-paper.

3. The Firepot: reimagining Hotpot by Rahul Jeyaraj - Second Prize

The Fire Pot is a self-serve hotpot counter with eight ingredient bins built into the tabletop. A ceiling-mounted projector turns the whole surface into a display and a webcam watches your hands, so reaching for a bin projects its name, price, calories, and a plain-language tasting note right onto the food itself — no screen, no app, nothing to hold. A load cell sits under every bin, so scooping food into your bowl prices it live in an on-table cart, and the running total updates as you add or return ingredients.
 
A Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 is the board reading all eight load cells: each cell runs through its own HX711 amplifier, and the XIAO aggregates all eight channels and streams them to the host over USB at 115200 baud. Its small footprint let it sit on a simple prototype-board carrier tucked under the tabletop, wired to eight load cells, which is what makes the whole live-weighing, live-pricing interaction possible.

4. PaperDine: Touch-Free Restaurant Management System by Ameya Angadi - Third Prize

PaperDine is an end-to-end, touch-free smart restaurant ecosystem designed to eliminate unhygienic screens and improve kitchen workflow. By combining cloud databases with edge AI, the system synchronizes front-of-house customer ordering with back-of-house order management in real-time.
 
The project heavily incorporates the Seeed Studio ecosystem across all physical touchpoints:
 
TRMNL 7.5″ OG DIY Kit: Utilized for both the “TableSpot” (a dynamic, interactive customer signage panel for daily specials and QR ordering) and the “ChefAssist” (a high-contrast Kitchen Order Display System).
 
Grove Vision AI Module V2: Runs local edge-AI gesture recognition (Rock, Paper, Scissors) in the kitchen, allowing chefs to clear tickets and manage orders completely touch-free.
 
Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C3: Acts as the primary controller for the Vision AI module, processing the gesture data, triggering audio feedback via a buzzer, and communicating seamlessly with our Firebase cloud backend.
 
SenseCraft AI & HMI(Seeedash): I utilized SenseCraft HMI(Seeedash) to deploy code-free, custom UI graphics to the TableSpot screens, and SenseCraft AI to seamlessly flash the hand-gesture detection model onto the Vision AI module.

5. SmartServe by Muhammed Shibin P, Shamil Ibrahim, Goutham M, Bechan Biju - Third Prize

SmartServe is an end-to-end IoT restaurant automation platform designed to eliminate dining friction, streamline floor operations, and bridge the communication gap between diners and restaurant staff. The system enables customers to instantly request service, ask for the bill, leave reviews, and provide tips, while giving managers and waiters real-time visibility through live dashboards.
 
They specifically chose the Wio Terminal for this project because its compact, all-in-one design integrates a vibrant 2.4-inch color LCD screen, reliable onboard Wi-Fi, and tactile physical buttons into a single, sleek enclosure.
 
This completely eliminates the need for messy external wiring, breadboards, or extra shields, making it an ideal, plug-and-play tabletop device. Diners can easily interact with the physical buttons to trigger instant requests, while the screen provides clear, immediate visual confirmation of their actions.

6. Table Map by Michał Krajnik - Third Prize

AI Table Map turns the “please wait to be seated” card into a live map of the restaurant.
 
The Seeed Studio reTerminal E1001 is the whole guest-facing device. Its 7.5″ ePaper shows which tables are free, how many people each one seats, and how long the wait will be. Everything on that screen is drawn by the E1001 itself, on its ESP32-S3, using Seeed_GFX and all four grey levels of the panel. The same chip joins WiFi through its own setup portal, finds the server over mDNS, and drives an 80-LED halo around the printed frame that turns green, amber or red as the room fills up.
 
The occupancy comes from AI: a YOLO26n person detection model running on a Raspberry Pi, watching the restaurant’s existing IP camera. You draw one box around each table, and that single step feeds everything.
 
The staff get their own screen too – a touch dashboard with a floor plan of the same room. It flags a table the moment guests sit down and nobody has greeted them yet, and one tap claims the table or holds it for a booking.
 
All the AI runs inside the building. No frames stored, no cloud.

7. KaiSign: Accessible Dining for Everyone by KAIZEN - Best In-Restaurant Experience Award

KaiSign is an accessible AI-powered restaurant ordering system that enables customers to order independently through three interaction modes: touch, American Sign Language (ASL), and voice. 
 
Normal-mode users navigate the menu through a compact capacitive keypad, Deaf users can communicate custom requests through a camera-based ASL recognition system, and blind users interact through voice using the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, whose built-in microphone captures their requests. A Raspberry Pi runs the KaiSign dashboard and AI pipeline, while the XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense provides the compact user interface and voice input.
 
By combining Seeed hardware with AI-driven interaction, KaiSign transforms a conventional restaurant kiosk into a single, adaptable platform designed to make ordering more independent, accessible, and efficient for everyone.

8. VERT (Versatile Eco-farming Robotic Technology) by Musi Princess-Shanelle Eneck - Most Popular Award + Sustainable Signage Impact Award

V.E.R.T. (Versatile Eco-Farming Robotic Technology) is a smart, automated greenhouse system designed to make farming more efficient, sustainable, and accessible. It uses sensors, automation, and robotics to monitor key growing conditions such as temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and pH, then automatically responds when plants need attention. A connected web dashboard allows farmers to monitor and control their greenhouse remotely.
 
V.E.R.T combines Seeed Studio hardware, IoT, and robotics to help farmers reduce resource waste, protect crops from unpredictable weather, and improve food production even in small spaces.

What’s Next? From Minimum Solutions to Bigger Possibilities

 

The Interactive Signage Contest has always been about more than building creative displays. It’s about exploring what makers can achieve when accessible hardware meets real-world needs.

A solution doesn’t have to start big. Sometimes, all it takes is a development board, a sensor, a display, and an idea worth trying. What matters is taking that first step — building something that works, sharing it with others, and opening the door for more people to build upon it.

And the journey doesn’t end with the winners! We’re excited to keep supporting promising projects beyond the contest, helping makers share their work more widely, make their solutions easier to reproduce, and explore opportunities to bring them into real-world applications and even commercial products.

✨ As a special highlight, the winning projects will also be featured at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2026 on December 12–13, bringing these creative solutions to an even bigger global maker audience!

A heartfelt thank you to our judges, partners, supporters, and every maker who took part. Your creativity, curiosity, and willingness to build are what make this community so special. 💚

And yes, we’ll be back next year! More ideas, more experiments, and more real-world solutions. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build next.

Start small. Build something real. Make an impact. 🚀

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Alison Yang

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