IDEA

Working with Inition the brief was to build an application that could be installed at the Lisbon airport to act as a point of sale for travellers at the airport. The installation had to incorporate a touchscreen interface as well as the main application choices being controlled by a physical rolling pin. In addition the application also had to be able to run on an Ipad that was given to people at the airport. The final request was that the app had to be multi-lingual support 3 languages.

CHALLENGES

To incorporate the actions of a rolling pin translating the up and down movements into controls for a application. To build the application in a way that could be easily translated and amended and finally find a way to build it just once and allow the app to be exported to both a windows touch screen app and IOS Ipad app.

SOLUTION

I used Unity to build the application and interfaced with an Arduino that was programmed with multiple magnetic Hall sensors to work out the position of the rolling pin. This information was fed into the Unity app and the data received from the Arduino used to control the application. The application used a JSON file to store all the language translations which was hosted on a website. The application when loaded checked this file to ensure all translations in the app were up to date and allowed us to make changes the copy from London while the installation was being installed in Lisbon. The app was built in a way that options inside of the Unity editor could be changed with simple tick boxes that allowed the app to be exported as a tablet app for ios, desktop touchscreen app as well as options to disable the Rolling pin should it become broken after installation.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Unity, Arduino, HTML, JSON

RESULT

The installation was installed and ran for a week in the airport. After the first installation the client was very happy with the result and asked us to return to re-install the installation for a further week later in the year.