Date of Award

5-2003

Type

Thesis

Major

Computer Science - Applied Computing Track

Department

TSYS School of Computer Science

First Advisor

Stan Kurkovsky

Abstract

In today's fast paced life saving time is the first priority of every business organization and presenting information visually is a highly desirable and the easiest way to impressively communicate to people. For that purpose, there are interactive devices called kiosks, which display multimedia data on a display and are quite often attached to other input/output hardware like keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. Most of today's kiosks are custom made and are designed for specific set of target platform. The task of creating a kiosk can turn out to be difficult and fairly time consuming. The aim of this thesis is to research an easier and faster way to develop kiosks and to generalize the processing power behind different kiosks by developing a driver program, which takes some form of input and multimedia data and presents the information as a kiosk. Putting it to reality, we developed a light-weight engine and called it Kiosk Engine, KE for short. KE is designed to take input in the form of an XML file which specifies the sources of multimedia data such as audio files, video files, text, image files and documents along with some attributes such as size, color, location, order and grouping with respect to other objects on the kiosk. As aimed, the processing power is separated from data and hence all that is required to be changed for making different kiosks is the multimedia data and the input XML file. Besides, platform independence is achieved by using Java™ as the programming language. Hence Kiosks driven by Kiosk Engine can run on any Java Virtual Machine [LindholmY03] that has the necessary framework support. The report shows comparison of KioskEngine with other products on the market, followed by a detailed explanation of XML file structure for KioskEngine and the Java™ classes in KioskEngine. The intent of this thesis is also to demonstrate the capability of Kiosk Engine by developing a working prototype, to research the future prospects of Kiosk Engine and explore additional functionalities that could be incorporated into Kiosk Engine with little extra work.

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