Johnson Gun Collection Kiosk
Background
Apt Media subcontracted with Quatrefoil Associates to design and build a custom kiosk application for this popular exhibit of civil war arms and accoutrements at the Fredericksburg Area Museum. Our work included the kiosk front-end as well as a browser-accessible data-entry back end.
Inside the kiosk
The kiosk has two main functions: allow visitors to explore in greater detail objects in two nearby display cases and learn about objects not on display. Thumbnail images at the top of the screen are generated dynamically and can be updated by the museum as the display case objects change.
Zoom in
The main attraction of the kiosk is the fantastic high resolution images of each object on display. Visitors can zoom, pan, and view predetermined areas of interest. The application can display an unlimited number of images in the scrolling window at the top. Areas of interest for each image are assigned in a specially designed back-end widget; no additional closeup photos are required.
The technology
The kiosk application runs in the iCab browser on a Mac Mini and is built using PHP, javascript MooTools, and MySQL. In addition to the “areas of interest” function, we also built a cool custom widget that allows museum staff to arrange and renumber display case thumbnails just by dragging and dropping.
Credits
End client: Fredericksburg Area Museum, Fredericksburg, MD
Our client: Quatrefoil Associates, Inc., Laurel, MD
Team: Kim Bieler, Andy Green (Sonjara Inc.), Izac Ross
