Advertising display kiosk. Would a browser be ok?

Question

I am considering a project in which workstations, connected to a central server display various content under the control of a central timeline.

Requirements are that the kiosks could have various compositions of monitor and an extended desktop. This screen space would be use to display images, movies or various mosaics of images and movies.

For example, a machine with 3x3 monitors might be configured to display video in the lowest right four screens, a title on the top three videos and whatnot elsewhere.

I am figuring out how to create the viewer. I think that sticking to web technologies I know well would be good and using JavaScript for the timeline engine sounds easy.

As for codecs and video drivers I think I would stick with Chrome, Css3 and Html5, I think I can require Chrome and Windows 7.

There are a few concerns, though.

Will there be performance problems considering video split on different monitors on an extended desktop?

Will it be pixel predictable to size and stack divs so that images fit inside a physical monitor or monitor group?

Thank you all.

Answer 1

A great solution for this is Adobe AIR. You are already talking about HTML, might as well check that out.

The nice thing is that AIR provides facilities for kiosks. Check out this link:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_kiosk.html

Just replace everything there that says Flex with HTML/Javascript. The platform functionality is available to both technologies.

As for stretching a browser or AIR app across multiple screens, I believe you would have to manually position the window yourself. I.e., if you maximize an app window on a multi-monitor setup, it expands to the size of the monitor only, not the entire viewable area. You likely will have to manually position/resize in Javascript.

As for using Chrome as a client, see this thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=12bde481a208c4ca&hl=en

It doesn't look like Chrome supports a kiosk mode.

Answer 2

Browser shouldn't be a problem at all. Just remember the architecture - you'll need a server somewhere and each kiosk will be a client. Just set up a port/url for your app and there you go. Chrome has some features that allow you to prevent users from exiting the app. I forget the specifics, I believe it involves incognito mode and something

Company I work for does something a lot like this. We make 'apps' that run on iPad and another touch screen device called MSI (btw - one of the advantages here is the freedom of using different client platforms), but not in the typical Objective-C way. Theres a server with a LAMP stack and the client uses the browser.

Will there be performance problems considering video split on different monitors on an extended desktop?

I think more than multiple monitors what you really have is multiple clients. This is interactive to some degree right?

Will it be pixel predictable to size and stack divs so that images fit inside a physical monitor or monitor group?

Yes. I don't really do artsy design and display details so I can't comment on specifics. But I don't think this is too hard - especially if all the clients are similar. Majority of this would be dictated by CSS.

EDIT - took a look a what we do on chrome. between running on start up, using kiosk mode and incognito (both can be runtime flags) and the regular F11 kind of full screen, you should be pretty much there