What’s better than 1 screen kiosk? A 3 screen kiosk!

Recently completed and installed for the Sydney Theatre Company is this latest project I worked on at Spinifex Group.

The project was developed using FDT for all coding and Flash Professional to create graphic elements (as .swc files). The end product was an Adobe Air desktop application. Again I took advantage of the great Robotlegs framework for this project and my favourite tweening engine of all Greensock’s Tweenmax. This also marked the first application I used Gestureworks for the touch handling.

Developing over multiple screens can be a bit tricky!

This was our first chance to use the new 3M multitouch screens, and I must say they are the best screen I have used from a touch perspective. Using a Windows 7 installation the screens are detected automatically and require no calibration to instantly give you mullitouch functionality. Unfortunately (at the time of development) there are no drivers for OSX.

The hardware solution was for each screen to have a computer – thus, each one is connected to a Mac Mini with a Bootcamp installation of Windows 7.

There are times when each 3rd of the kiosk needs to know what the other 2 are doing or send what it is doing to them. This was resolved by usingRTMFP for the communication . For example, when someone chooses to watch a video on one screen the others are alerted that this is happening and they temporarily make their video content unavailable. This was done to stop the sound of the videos over-riding each other due to their close proximity to each other. Once the video was complete or the visitor stopped it, the others were alerted to make their video available again.

Google Analytics

Also included in this kiosk was tracking via Google Analytics. Generally only websites can be tracked with this, but with a bit of thinking and a HTMLLoader instance it was achieved!

Installation day came and I was tucked up in a little computer room with the 3 screen, 3 Mac Minis and cables galore. Once I had the computers running and connecting to the local network and tested that they could talk to each other, it was time to leave them for the fabricators to piece it all together.

Setup and testing onsite at Sydney Theatre Company

There was an update that needed to be installed after the kiosk was installed, I was able to do this remotely using Teamviewer – and will also use this process to install any new content or versions of the kiosk.

Updates via Teamviewer

At the end of it all, Spinfex was invited to come along for some drinks for the unavailing of the kiosk and rub shoulders with a few famous people in attendance! Overall I really enjoyed this project, it threw a few curve-balls but I think they got knocked out of the park 🙂

Some screenshots and more information can be found at Spinfex Group.

JK