August 2007 Archives
I mentioned it in a previous blog post that I was working on a touch-screen kiosk that the PSU All-Sports Museum needed. Today the museum installed the kiosk for the public to view. It is located prominently just inside the main entrance to the right of the reception desk.
The museum directors wanted a new kiosk to honor all the media (print, TV, and radio) personnel who have covered PSU sports over the years. Originally, WinMill Software created their other kiosks for each sport. They were done really well, and they wanted to keep this look consistent with their new kiosk. This one, however, would be a bit different. They had ordered a large LCD monitor (much like what we have in the hallway in Rider II) that they wanted to display videos on.
The problem with what WinMill did for them was that they never gave the museum the original Flash (FLA) files if they wanted to make changes or create a new one. So I had to reverse engineer the same functionality into the new one. They had also used many text files that would load the info for each person dynamically. I got to looking at all the files and thought "oh, man, this is a nightmare!" I think he said they had something like 2700 text files they were using for the existing kiosks. No way was I going to deal with a bunch of separate text files.
This was about the time I learned how to use XML and FileMaker Pro to work with Flash. I was able to create a database in FileMaker that could combine all the records for this kiosk into one file. Currently there are over 300 records in the FileMaker DB and each record has 30 entries (first name, last name, whether they were print, radio, TV, or a combination these, their bio, photograph, any videos associated with them, etc.). My experience with this project really helped me figure out what to do with Leonard Pott's simulation.
Some of the challenges I had were to get good quality Flash video for the samples. I used what I typically use, but it just didn't look very good on the large LCD monitor. I ended up bumping up the data rate to 2400 kbits/sec and putting a keyframe every 6 frames. Typically for streaming we recommend a key frame every 5 seconds. At 30 frames per second I was putting one every 1/5 of a second. But the quality looks really nice now and their computer handles it well.
Another challenge was that not everyone has a video associated with them and the ones that did might have anywhere from 1 to 10 videos. Nothing was really standard, so my scripting had to be flexible enough to allow for it. Also, the people's photos varied in width and I had to put the buttons 15 pixels to the right of them. So I had to dynamically place the right number of buttons and also place them to the right of the image depending on how wide it was.
Still another problem was that the computer had 2 monitors and I had some code that makes the Flash module go full screen, but it only works properly for one monitor. So although my Flash animation was 1600 pixels wide, when it went into full screen mode it was getting squashed into 800 pixels. So it meant that I had to manually adjust the Flash player to fill the screen. Not a good idea to have to do every time you restart the computer.
The answer to the monitor problem was to only use a one monitor setup and set the resolution to 1600 wide by 600 high. Then I was able to use the code:
getURL("FSCommand:fullscreen","true");
getURL("FSCommand:showmenu","false");
to make the Flash fill the screens. We were looking into a h/w device called DualHead2Go by Matrox. They make something that takes input to one monitor and stretches is across 2 or 3 monitors. Really a great way to play Halo, to be sure. But, it ended up that we didn't need it after all after changing the monitor settings.
Well, at any rate, I got the kiosk done just in time for the first football game, which was the goal. It looks really good and the Sports Museum folks are happy. So, if you get time, check it out. The museum is on the Jordan Center side of Beaver Stadium at ground level. It's free to go in and look around. It's really an outstanding display of PSU sports memorabilia, information, and videos.
