Public Access Internet Terminals

	The Birmingham Media Hub has deployed several designs of kiosk to different sites, each tailored to the location. On the left is a unit located in the Birmingham Centre for Manufcturing canteen. It is designed to be used in office stlye locations. It has a 17" touch screen bonded on to an industrial frame chassis. It is driven by a 350Mhz Pentium pc with 128MB of RAM. This is a test unit we use to try out ideas, and as such it dual boots windows98 and SuSE Linux. In the photograph it is running windows98, guess which is more reliable.... The windows version was written by Brad Carwardine using Visual Basic. It uses the IE browser present on windows machines as the underlying rendering engine (with all its securitiy vulnerabilities and standards incompatibility unfortunately). The standard browser buttons are implemented on screen with clear text labels to help simplfy operation. The web page requested is displayed in the middle of the screen at 800x600 resolution. The Linux version uses the XFree86 server without a window manager, and just the KDE Konquoror web browser set to respawn if it is closed. The geometry options allow the browser window to be located so that the menu bar is just off the top of the screen, preventing finger (mouse) access to unwanted functions.
Below left is a unit at Inkerman House, it was designed as a sit down unit with space for writing/note taking in front of the touch screen.