This means that all pages are cached when the kiosk is started and all database connectivity is set up and ready to go. This leads to a kiosk that is very responsive, which is very critical as people tend to walk away from kiosks that take to long to respond. The kiosk supports both JMF and the Sun MediaCenter for the display of video content. The MPEG streams can be expanded up to 3 to 1 to nearly fill the entire kiosk screen with full motion, high quality video. The JMF version of this is used in the Super Bowl kiosk to provide a video featuring the highlights San Diego has to offer as well as a welcome message in both Spanish and English by the Mayor.
Videos are as easily integrated on pages as any other object using the external configuration files.
Lightweight GUI components. To give a richer look and feel to kiosk content, Apunix developed a set of lightweight GUI compoments for displaying text, lists, etc. These allow content to be layered on top of graphic background without the grey boxes provided by heavyweight components. In addition, for scrolling lists the native scroll bars are too small to be useable in a touch screen environment and thus we implemented our own lightwight scroll buttons for the lightweight lists. This was used extensively in the Super Bowl kiosk to allow reuse of graphic backgrounds by overlaying different text on the same background on a group of pages.