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Check these guys out [kersonic.com]: They are specialized in pretty much exactly what you need.

You definitely want to use sound technologies, streaming, etc. Don't underestimate your audience, your average user tends to be really clueless, which means your terminals have to be rock-solid.

Congrats on landing what sounds like a cool project!

maybe hire someone that can do the job?

You may want to have a look at www.ookl.org.uk, a system for engaging people, often kids, in art and museum content. On OOKL, people use mobiles and computers to curate, share and present their own collections of material collected from the cultural venue (or world at large). I think OOKL's story-centric approach is very interesting.

Having been involved in OOKL early on I know all the server tech is Linux based. Give them a call -- they are a friendly bunch!

I've been looking at LinuxMCE [linuxmce.org] for my own home system. It looks like a really good fit for what you want: Media, touchscreen controls, multiple outputs. Plus, it's a thin-client system, so once you decide on a terminal setup, you can repeat ad nauseum.

I would also point out that this may be a good setup for the expansion you're alluding to. For example, you could set up different accounts for either different works or different artists. Log all the terminals in one room to the account under that artist, and you could have the media for all the different pieces queued up on the menu.

Hmmm..if you ever had a Salvador Dali [wikipedia.org] exhibit, you could have some Dark Side of the Moon playing on the sound system...

I did a project like this about 10 years ago for a museum in London. We used pretty much exactly the same technology as you except we used Windows and it was IE in kiosk mode and not Firefox, and it was Macromedia Generator, not Flash Media Server.

Don't worry too much about what technical things the designers are saying, they don't understand the technology like you do and they can only present ideas from the few technical things they understand. As long as the end user sees what the designers want them to see, then they'll be happy. Use the best technology you know how to use.

I would disagree with the poster above regarding using sound technologies. You have to remember that museums can be pretty noisy places, especially during high profile exhibitions and on weekends (if you've been there during working hours on a workday, don't think that's as busy as it gets!). The background noise can prevent a user from properly hearing the audio, and having audio too loud can disturb and irritate other visitors.

Sure, add audio if you think it'll enhance the product but don't make the mistake of having an interface that needs audio to function. Get some of your testers to use the kiosk for the first time without the sound on. if they can't use it then you need to fix that.

Also remember museums are visited by tourists from other countries, you'll probably have to have translations from some of the major languages if your kiosk relies on language to be used (if you use spoken languages, you'll have to have subtitles as well because of sound difficulties)

You might be able to reduce costs if the museum agrees to a sponsorship deal. Manufacturers may be willing to provide the touch screens and/or other hardware if they get a "powered by" logo on the kiosk.

Why not just have consumer DVD players adapted for touchscreens, and stick them in kiosks? My day job involves working on a kiosk put out by a division of the Boston Museum of Science, and it's completely self-contained; so is most everything on the floor.

Burn a new DVD for the new exhibit, dump it in the kiosks near it, you're done, no finicky wiring to set up. KISS.

Find out who is going to be creating the content that will be shown, talk to them about their needs as if you care, but really pay attention when they talk about what software they use to do the authoring. then research that and find out what formats it supports. Maybe it's all flash like you said, but if someone is expecting quicktime or silverlight, you'd better find that out now instead of six months from now after you've ordered 100 linux boxes.

The cd/dvd jukebox idea is terrible. Loading a DVD will take more time than anyone is willing to sit around and wait, furthermore what if five people at five different kiosks want to look at content located on 5 different DVDs? That level of DVD changer is way more expensive than management realizes. A big rack of sata disks under control of a NAS server is probably your best bet. Also, I would worry less about RAID and more about being able to quickly cold swap a failed NAS server.

A "would be nice" is a way for people to walk around and interact with the exhibits without having to repeatedly press the "English" or "Spanish" or "French" buttons on each and every touchscreen. I hate that. They should be able to just grab an rfid token out of a bucket and walk around...and the whole place seems to be in their native language. Hey, maybe have a mic and the kiosk listens for common words in each language and acts accordingly.

Museums swap exhibits in and out fairly often. Have some low-effort way for the curators to swap the kiosk content to match. Maybe the content is tied to an inventory number and the curators can just enter a (semi) admin password, then the inventory number and set the default content right there. the general idea is that the last thing you want is to have to spend the rest of your life assigning content to kiosks.

I'd look into something wireless for the floor sensors/big buttons, like hacking into a bluetooth mouse. Then the curators can move things around a bit, change batteries, even redo the pairing if they want to move buttons between exhibits.

If you're thinking 100 or more kiosks in the long run, I'd look into PXE booting or similar just to avoid any OS install/upgrade/patch labor being multiplied by 100.

Firewall! Last thing you want is some 2 y/o kid to type some random museum words like "nude" or "maplethorp" into a browser and get 20M pages of confusing things on google images while their prudish american parents have a little conservative republican freak out.

Best of luck with this. In spite of the tone of my comments I'm quite jealous. This sounds like one of the most fun projects anyone could ever get!

Hello,

I highly recommend "Ideum." (http://www.ideum.com/) They are based near Albuquerque, New Mexico and specialize in EXACTLY that sort of thing. I interviewed with this company during a job search I went through a few months ago, but after receiving an offer I decided to work with another small company that provided a better offer instead. Ideum has some cool table top, and desk top museum exhibits in place for major museums already. The founder, Jim Spadaccini, is an extremely friendly and nice guy.

They have a general software framework in place built using ActionScript and C++ to make building custom, interactive, touch-screen programs very fast. Their process was quite impressive, and seemed well designed to segregate the work between the hard core coder and the hard core artist in order to quickly make an impressive exhibit. One of the coolest products they were developing was called "GestureWorks." It is designed to make programming multi-touch displays very easy in ActionScript. As a programmer, I can add an eventListener to an object for "throw away" or for "click and hold."

If you give them a call, tell Jim that Brian Stinar referred you! If he gets busy enough, maybe I'll get a consulting or contracting gig on the side out of it.

I hope this help,

      -Brian J. Stinar-

Don't hire an IT company. This is not primarily an IT job.

You want someone who can design interfaces, design interesting exhibits and instructional interactivities, and who can work with technical people to make it happen.

I can't count the number of museums I've visited where the whizbang kiosks/interactive displays/demonstrations were out of order. From the lowliest county historical society exhibition to the Smithsonian in DC. Whatever you do, keep an up-to-date set of troubleshooting and repair procedures as you go along. Something easy to follow so that even a simpleton volunteer will be able to get the thing back up and running.