links:
The iChi Public Touchscreen collects, archives, and displays user-created sketches and information related to events at the Canvas Gallery and Cafe.
iChi Community Members JSP
iChi Digital Scrapbook JSP
iChi Post JSP
iChi is a "Plasma Poster," a large public touchscreen display, supporting informal communication within and between communities at the Canvas Gallery Cafe at 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco.
iChi is the creation of the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL) and Jonathan Helfman. Plasma Poster networks let authenticated members post content to large touchscreens in public places. User-posted content takes the form of Web pages, images, MPGs, or formatted email messages. Unlike previous Plasma Posters, iChi is deployed outside of a corporation in a very public place that serves many diverse communities. iChi supports six channels or categories of posted content: Canvas, music, open-mic, art, scribbles, and communities.
Jonathan Helfman designed and implemented the secure web-based
management pages for maintaining information about members and
member-posted content.
Helfman created the logo in Illustrator and the channel icons using
Flash and Photoshop. He wrote the HTML, JavaScript, JSPs, and several
of the Java Bean methods that query the MySql database to return
information about iChi members and their posted content. He also shot
numerous photographs at the Canvas
Gallery, many of which were used as iChi's content postings and to
texture the backgrounds of the JSPs.
One of the most important requirements for the Canvas Gallery was to
support the collection of email addresses from customers. Helfman
designed and created a "soft keyboard" to allow touchscreen users to
type in their addresses. Using Flash MX PushButton components for
easy skinning, Helfman designed the keyboard to mimic the classic
Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. To facilitate typing email addresses,
special keys were added, such as ".com", ".org", and
"@aol.com". Because only one key may be pressed at a time on the
touchscreen, the "shift" key functions as a "shift lock" and relabels
the keys to show their shifted form. The "@" key appears on both the
shifted and unshifted keyboard.
Churchill, Nelson, Denoue, Helfman, and Murphy, “Sharing Multimedia Content with Interactive Public Displays: A Case Study,” to appear in DIS 2004, 791K pdf.
