Resources for building public information displays

Question

I would like to displays schedules, maps and other informations on displays in a building for visitors. These displays would provide at most mouse input but no keyboard.

Ten years ago this was the domain of Macromedia Director but today I believe that browsers and content management systems provide a better architecture. However, I could not find a single open source system for this purpose, not even some CSS styles. I would be grateful for ideas how to implement public information systems that are low on interactivity.

Answer 1

SVG would be the best bet. It will let you draw maps of your buildings and interactively zoom in/out and pan around, plus let you click on items of interest to bring up details.

What are your constraints? will this be in a touchscreen enclosure running IE or Firefox in Kiosk mode? (e.g. like a visual directory in a building lobby?)

See the Adobe building in San Jose for example.

Answer 2

Just build a Web site displaying information clearly. You could apply all the mobile best practices to the site. Since when you scale it, to a large screen, you have the same sort of legibility problems.

Another trick is to alter the CSS overflow property to prevent a scroll bar showing up.

I use http://webconverger.com for displaying signs using Web applications.