Kiosks – More than just keyboards, mice, and touch panels

Creating great applications by adding scanners, printers, card readers and sound

When designing kiosk applications, accessories such as scanners, card readers and printers add more and innovative ways of interacting with the customers. The MultiQ digital signage system includes a number of such devices to fit directly into your project.

Many kiosks use a keyboard, a mouse or a touch panel to interact with the customer. However, certain accessories can add to the customer experience as well as provide you with valuable customer feedback.

In the figure you see some of the accessories that can be provided with your MultiQ media monitor or media player.

Accessories such as a floor stand, a scanner, a card reader or

a printer adds to the features of a kiosk application. The color of the floor stands as

well as the media monitors can be customized according to your preferences.

MultiQ media players and media monitors can be connected to external audio systems. However, in many cases you would prefer internal speakers to handle the sound tracks of video clips or to add sound effects when customers press buttons and so on. Therefore internal speakers can be provided with the media monitors as an option.

Scanners are very practical to let customers scan the EAN codes that are available on your products. The EAN codes can be associated with video clips, images or web pages that describe the product and are presented on the screen as the customer scans the item.

Card readers can be used to confirm that a customer is in possession of a particular loyalty card that is required to get a specific offer that is then presented on the screen.

Printers can be used to print queue tickets as well as recipes or other things that need to be remembered such as where to find a specific product in a store.

The standard kiosk floor mount will be a perfect home for your media monitor as well as the printer that can be fitted inside the pole. Common problems with built-in kiosks, such as overheating, are eliminated with this design.

As the customer scans a product, use the card reader or the printer, some content will be displayed and logged within the MultiQ digital signage management system. The logs may contain valuable information about what products are the most interesting to your customers.

Adding the right accessory will complete your kiosk.

Lars-Ingemar Lundström

Documentation and Training Manager, MultiQ

Creative digital signage with synchronized monitors

The traditional way of making a video wall by splitting a video signal to several monitors, described in the previous blog post, is a good start in creative digital signage. To make even more impressive installations you can go one step further and synchronize the content on several monitors using separate media players for each monitor. By synchronizing the media players you can create entire environments with an almost unlimited number of monitors all operating together at full resolution.  

Creative digital signage with synchronized monitors

The idea of synchronizing media players is that you can use individual content on each screen but still get the monitors to work together in a synchronized way.  In the figure below there are three animations (video clips) that are synchronized to start simultaneously. Since these video clips are provided by separate media players they can all be displayed at full HD resolution (1920x1080) pixels. Together they create a spectacular video wall having a total size of 5760 x 1080 pixels.

By synchronizing media players you can set up creative digital signage
applications with almost unlimited possibilities

 

In principle, any number of media players can be used in such an application. The media players are synchronized using a common sync message that is incorporated in the broadcast address packages in the local area network. Since all media players are listening to this address by default, there is no need to worry about the IP addresses individual media players. Also, a very high degree of accuracy of synchronization will be achieved regardless the number of media players and monitors.

Each time a playlist is looped, a new synchronization message is sent out making the media players to stay in sync indefinitely. Each media player contains a playlist that contains a number of video clips and images that are automatically kept in sync with the content displayed on the other monitors.

You are free to set up any kind of synchronized monitor application and do not necessarily need to group the monitors as a video wall. There are lots of other creative ways to use the synchronized screens. An example is in an escalator or in a staircase where the monitors are placed at some distance between each other. You can then make an animation where you let objects move from one monitor to the next to create very impressive dynamic effects. 

More information on how to build the animated content shown in the figure is to be found in the MultiQ Content Creation Quick Guide Part 1. The application above has been made using Serif Draw Plus X5. This tool allows for large high resolution animations to be rendered into several separate animations that fit into each screens. Using this method you will automatically get a number of video clips having the same duration and that will be displayed perfectly synchronized using the MultiQ digital signage system.

Lars-Ingemar Lundström

Documentation and Training Manager, MultiQ