For the students, faculty, staff and visitors of the FH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria’s “green heart” county capital, it had became a challenge on how to get around the newly built campus. With close to 4,000 students and 300 employees, the university felt a need for an upgrade of the “navigation system” to direct the crowd to their destination.
With a budget in place and hardware installed, the only thing left to complete the upgrade was the information system itself. That project became my baby 🙂 There are touch-screen terminals linked with hanging plasma displays on all main entrances to campus buildings on remote locations, spread among three cities. The displays feature local information such as campus news & events, canteen menus, traffic, public transport schedules, city and world news bulletins etc., for each of the three cities.
Image and promotional videos and student project videos are streamed daily to display the latest work of undergraduate and graduate programs available. During the annual “Open House” event, these displays show current and upcoming events with timetables and locations.
These info points soon became interesting for commercial purposes as well, so the Marketing Department decided to turn them into advertising spaces, both on a daily basis and during special events taking place on campus.
The software to design and schedule the content on the screens was developed internally by the employees of the Information Design Transfer Center. After creating a display template and placing dynamic content containers, you can schedule that display to be active on a daily/weekly basis or to be shown only once at a specific time.
All of the touchscreen terminals are equipped with barcode readers, extendable with RFID readers. The idea behind this was to print barcodes on event invitations or even lecture notes, in order to get directions. The uses for RFID are numerous, since all students and employees are issued one within their ID cards, but the first one to be implemented would be for students to get their timetables displayed without punching in their ID via the touch-screen.
So, every terminal has access to following features:
- Classroom, Lecture Hall and Office Locator
(this was to be extended with “infopoint-to-infopoint navigation”) - Timetables for All Students
- Information About Faculty Members and Employees
- Event Calendar
An example of an Employee Detail screen with the Locator button.
When the button is pressed, the following screen emerges, highlighting the office location of the employee selected and showing your location on the map. The buttons on the right hand side allow you to navigate the building levels, displaying the floor plans for each level.
Next to managing the project, my tasks included designing the user interface, screen design and providing the system with XML data. The system works surprisingly fast with no lag time between clicks and was accepted by users from the beginning. There is a constant feel of being in control of the system – you can always go one step back or back to the home screen.
From the interviews with users I received a general positive response.
One of them actually said: “I don’t think I can break it, so I like to snoop around it”, which made my day 🙂
On the technical side, I’m particulary proud that I managed to gather existing data and channel it into this system, so it needs practically no maintenance. To be more precise on the sources:
- Event Calendar picks up all current and upcoming events from the CMS used to display info on the university website. These are inputted online daily by dozens of university web administrators. They are cached with every change and fetched in XML.
- Locations are stored in a SAP database and managed by office secretaries for purposes of booking lectures and events. They are exported into CSV files, which I managed to parse and convert to XML.
- Timetables can be calculated from the above files, so they get parsed and pushed in XML too.
- Employee Data is kept in Oracle databases which can be queried. The request can be converted to XML. However, the telephone number is stored in MS Active Directory. After you get that info, you can query the Cisco system for information on the room where that telephone device is located and voilá – you are set to go. Append that XML-DOM with location and phone number and send it to the touch screen 🙂
This is one of the projects I had the most fun with, and one that has the most potential for expansion.
