November 11, 2011

Digital Screens Update

While projects like the home page and navigations refresh, the search engine prototype ui and the alumni connectivity project have kept me busy of late, I have found a few minutes to give the digital screens another quick update. Admittedly, one of the updates was absolutely necessary as the end of Daylight Savings Time tweaked the display of some of the events to be an hour off. So while I was in there doing an immediate quick fix to deal with that, I took a few ho…

While projects like the home page and navigations refresh, the search engine prototype ui and the alumni connectivity project have kept me busy of late, I have found a few minutes to give the digital screens another quick update.

Admittedly, one of the updates was absolutely necessary as the end of Daylight Savings Time tweaked the display of some of the events to be an hour off. So while I was in there doing an immediate quick fix to deal with that, I took a few hours to give the screens code some additional upgrades. The short list follows.

Daylight Savings Time (bug fix)

The screens should now properly display events regardless of DST.

Fewer Duplicate Events (new)

You should now see fewer duplicate copies of the same event on the screen. LiveWhale’s sharing system is wonderful for the user but does require some additional thought when tapping into it with external applications since there can be multiple versions of the “same” content available at any one time.

The screens now match events based on time, place and a fuzzy-match on title similarity. This means that the LiveWhale event that you personally created may not be on the screens (it will be on your website as always), but that at least one matching event will. (The system is designed to not be overzealous in matching — displaying too many of the same event is better than missing one.)

Investigating User Interaction

Today, we hooked up a Kinect to the test screen in our office and after installing some additional open source code, experimented with how a Kinect-controlled user interface might be like. (Check out the images of Morgan and I using it.) Truth be told, it was a little rough and prone to mistaken choices, even when you know its gestures. However, it does have some benefits over our alternative choice, control by smart phone so we’ll take a closer look at the underlying code.

Have an idea about the screens? Be sure to tell us.