Kiosk

Every year, the Brazos Valley Veterans Memorial Board was faced with the expensive addition of new, bronze plaques and structures containing a wall-identification reference to help families find their loved ones' names on the memorial wall. In addition to the expense of these giant, bronze plates, their usability was sorely lacking: to most quickly find one's name, one would have to know the year in which that name was added to the wall.

The physical kiosk shell was professionally painted and refinished by A&M Twin City Paint & Body Shop. The kiosk's overall interface and navigation was designed in Flash by then-local designer Stanton Ware, and the programming and Microsoft Access database back end were developed by BCSWebstudio. The compiled .swf runs as a fullscreen executable a la MultidMedia. As names are added and dedicated each year, updating the database is a simple file-copy operation via USB flash drive.

The dated, bronze plates were removed, and a kiosk and beautiful pavilion containing it, designed by Eric Wivagg, were dedicated in February, 2007.

Bronius Motekaitis, then Brazos County webmaster, was tasked with devising a series of flat panels showing court hearing schedules analogous to flight arrival/departure schedules at major airports.

The "docket scroller" sits atop a simple DHTML interface running in Firefox in fullscreen "kiosk mode" atop Linux. Each row of four monitors is driven by a desktop PC with two dual-port video cards apiece. In a unique technological solution, I created an automated script to step through the legacy judicial management software, issuing the commands as if it were a human user producing a report of dockets. The flat data reports are then transformed into XML and loaded into the displays.

Six of the screens contain individual court dockets. The two screens on the right play self-running Flash animated tutorials in English and Spanish.

BCSWebstudio was subcontracted by nearby Exodus Technology to design and develop the application for this kiosk. Its placement in the lobby by the school office puts it, and the early families of All Saints Catholic Academy, in prominent view with a little pizazz. The families enjoy seeing themselves, and visitors are impressed with the futuristic statement this kiosk presents. Ideas of further improving upon it are already being considered.

The kiosk design was mocked up and approved, and the application was developed in Adobe Flash. The compiled .swf was deployed to the kiosk as a "kiosk mode" executable using Multidmedia Zinc.

Additional, unique skills involved in this project included batch processing of a large number of photos in Adobe Photoshop and digitally recorded audio files in GoldWave.