May 02 2008
Kiosk Technology
LG sent me this the other day, and asked “any ideas? I had thought that we might use it for real in the MS Office in view of SH coming over to the twisted dark side…..”
So, this lead me to think about how we could achieve this. The Hardware side of things is easy, though we’ll have to get a Touch Screen from somewhere. How best do we get our students to come up with a solution to this. The biggest issue is making it stable, and easy to restart in the possible event of a crash or freeze.
My first thoughts were these:
There are 3 ways that come to mind that this could be done.
- PowerPoint based application – probably a bit flaky
- Web page shown in Kiosk mode – better option + easy to set up
- Flash based using “Swish” or Adobe Flash (if it can be accessed). Swish is on the College Computers and I have flash on my Macbook. Also very easy to run as a Kiosk style appliance.
Yes, I think we could put one in MS. Would be a good demonstration tool of what we are about, using Technology created by our students in a “real world” situation.
How would you do it? What other options can you come up with? Lets see where this discussion can get us?
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… so how much is a touch screen likely to cost us? And where do we get it from?
I was thinking that KICT could launch a second competition, judge the winner & award a for the best kiosk plan.
Touch screens are usually around $900.00 – $1000.00 at the moment.
Again, I have a couple of options of how we can achieve this differently.
1. You can buy kits to convert an LCD to a Touch Screen (basic electronic knowledge needed) on eBay. reasonably priced and probably worth a try.
2. A College family run a local Photo Processing outlet. I have spoken to him in the past about the green “Fuji” photo kiosk’s that they use. Touch screen equipped computer in a small self contained unit. They are often available 2nd hand, and this could also be an option.
I’ll look into both of these for us and see what we can find.
And yes, I love the idea of the 2nd Competition. Even if they just design the layout, and we code the solution based on their ideas. Or get a SS Student to code the solution for us.
.. hey! I dont do code I do WORDS
Ah yes, but one of us needs to do the codeing. Looks like it’ll have to be me. I’ll meet with my possible source of a kiosk appliance tomorrow and see what we can come up with.