touch-less kiosks
creative
technology
In light of the pandemic there has been some discussion about touch-less exhibits for museums.
I think a lot of solutions revolve around visitors using gestures to control software. My experience tells me that it would be too complicated to learn custom gestures, it would probably lead to a lot of confusion.
I’ve seen installations where someone might wave their arms to make a bunch of virtual balls fly around a screen. Gestures are fine for that but I’m not convinced they are appropriate for navigating software menus.
My prototype calls for visitors to carry a small device to each exhibit and tap a reader to navigate on-screen controls.
Navigating with the device is simple: tap the right arrow to move to the next control, the left arrow to move back and enter to select.
One advantage of this approach is the device visitors carry around is inexpensive and does not require power. In additions, it makes navigating menus really simple and does not require any special software to be installed on the exhibit.
Embedded in the device visitors carry around the museum are three Near Field Communication (NFC) tags. Tags get there power from the reader, so there is no need for batteries in the device. I used some tags I already had and printed a custom holder. Tags are available in the form of round discs, rectangular cards or even stickers, affording flexibility of design of the device.
The reader I used is inexpensive and will also write to tags.. Tags used in my prototype have payloads of “left”, “right” and “enter”.
An Arduino Leonardo is connected to the reader and looks like a keyboard to the computer. Tapping tags generates a Tab for right Shift-Tab for left and Enter for enter.
To test the prototype I used a web app I had written a while ago. With no change to the app I was able to navigate by tapping the tags to the reader.