Senior Project - J.F.K.

The UCAR Unidata Program has two real-time weather kiosk systems running. One is at the NCAR Mesa Lab in the upstairs display area. That system gets its data over the Internet via an Ethernet connection. The other kiosk is at the Denver Museum of Natural History, where it gets its data via dialup connections to the Internet. Both utilized touchscreen display systems with proprietary DOS-based software for organizing hotspots on the screen, displaying menus, textual weather information, weather maps, and movie loops of weather.

The goal of this project was to replace the proprietary software for managing the menus, displays, and automated update of the kiosk information with a system based on Windows 95 and WWW/HTML technology. This involved the development of an environment to allow museum employees to perform the creation and maintenance of the weather kiosk web site, the insertion of a variety of components (text, audio, images, animations, video clips) into the site's web pages, and the automated update of these components from data available at various web sites around the country. The project was developed using a combination of C, C++, and Java to run on Windows 95 with Microsoft's Internet Explorer in kiosk mode.