An overview of the Acura kiosk touring around the auto shows of North America the past 2 seasons.
This kiosk has been a massive one in terms of features, content and revisions. When I joined Spinifex this project was already underway, it was being developed by another Flash developer and when it was initially launched for the first time in late 2009 I still had not much to do with it.
The developer moved into a different role in the company so I took over responsibility of the development of the project early 2010. After the 2010 season it was then updated and used again for the currently running 2011 season.
It incorporates content from a 3rd party that is used on the Acura website. This content was developed in AS2 and was having some problems when we were attempting to load it into our kiosk so in the end I decided to load it into a HTMLLoader instance and it worked perfectly.
The kiosk also sends user data to another system we have developed for creating customer leads and tracking the use of the kiosk. Relevant information is sent to prospective customers based on their preferences. The tracking of pages visited also gives the client an overview of how often the kiosk was used and what was popular… or not popular!
Other features include a dealer locator that is accessing a SQLite database or all the zipcodes in the US with their longitude and latitude co-ordinates. With the customers zip we then use a bit of math to work out the distance all the dealerships away, posting the closest 6 dealers. Using AIR’s ability to access SQLite databases makes this a fast process and simple to update if new dealerships are added later.
Twitter is all the rage so @Acura_Insider posts are also visible.
A good old page turner interactive is also in the kiosk for an Acura magazine – is a pretty cool experience turning the pages on a 46″ touchscreen!
Our video department created the video transitions and attractor.
Was a rather challenging project given the number of people involved over the past 2 seasons and 18 months and counting of updates and changes as the kiosk have evolved, but seemed to be worth it as we were told that Acura could attribute a solid percentage of sales due to the kiosk.
JK
