Posters are so passé. If you want to get people into your store today, you’d better have something more engaging in your window.

Something like interactive digital signage, with apps that include a virtual doll ready for customers to dress with clothes that just happen to be on sale inside.

Sounds like something out of a movie, but the technology is already available from Toronto’s GestureTek (www.gesturetek.com.) The company develops gesture-based (i.e. people can navigate with hand gestures instead of mice) digital apps with projection capabilities, to help retailers maximize the space they already have – like display windows – instead of having to buy monitors.

While at this point the technology is mostly used in museums and galleries like the Ontario Science Centre and Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, marketers are starting to catch on. BMW Japan used GestureTek’s GroundFX floor display in a showroom, and Samsung has a custom-built GestureTek interactive table display in its New York showroom. The GroundFX application is also popular in nightclubs, and at tradeshows to make display booths stickier.

Most of GestureTek’s current business is in Europe and Asia, but it’s recently begun focusing more on the Canadian market. Mississauga, Ont.-based marketing and sales consulting company InTouch Media Group (IMG) has been retained to help. The ClearTouch technology, which can project onto windows, typically starts at $15,000 to $30,000. IMG is shortly to announce GestureTek’s first big Canadian deal, launching this fall with a major national retailer.