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Touchscreen submenu support

Chris Russell

March 14, 2012 18:17

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Hi I'm from the Natural History Museum in London, and we are thinking of using Brightsign 1010 units to replace our existing video touchscreen controllers. I have a question - at the end of some of our video clips, the user is then offered a 'submenu' choice to find out further information, instead of going straight back to the menu page. Is this something that Bright author can support, or if not is it something you are thinking of implementing? It would be a really useful tool for ourselves, and no doubt many similar institutions. Most of the screens we are replacing are running legacy 4:3 aspect ratio PAL SD clips. Thanks.

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6 comments

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  RokuLyndon March 15, 2012 06:02

  
  
  What do you mean by a submenu choice? If there's a menu at the end of the video, that would work. Or, if you want to go to an image menu at the end of the video, you can do that as well.
  
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  Chris Russell March 15, 2012 22:12

  
  
  Hi Lyndon. Thanks for the reply. At the end of of some of our video clips, we give users the option to select areas of the screen that will take them off into further layers of information, or to return to the start. The touch areas on these 'submenus' are usually in different parts of the screen than those of the main menu. My question is can we assign the touchscreen areas in different ways depending on the route the user takes, so that for example we may have an initial menu screen that offers 4 'rectangular' areas to play the first clips, then at the end of the chosen first clip, we assign different areas to be touchable to take the user down to an extra layer of content, or return to the home page? Hope this makes sense? Thanks.
  
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  Michael April 03, 2012 17:23

  Hi Chris - we've done a fair bit of touchscreen work with the BrightSign 1010, and this would be possible by just branching the content out as you go if I understand correctly.  In BrightAuthor you assign 'end actions' to videos and images, so you would just assign the end action of the first video to be another video, image with touch buttons on it.  You could also do this I think by adding a zone over top of the video at the end.  You can define the end action to be to activate something on a zone over top of the video or image, but I think just simply switching media using the end action would work.  You'd just design the end of your video content to hold, or loop or something and if you design it right the user would never even notice the content swtiching at the end (there might be a very quick pause with the BS loads the end image or video with the new touch regions).   So I think there are a few ways you could do this...

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  Chris Russell April 10, 2012 12:39

  Hi Michael - thanks to both you and Lyndon for the responses. I'm currently awaiting delivery of a 1010 to start testing.

  I have another question. Speaking to our UK distributor (Pixels UK), they said that the Extension module may not allow for multiple buttons to be connected to activate different clips. We have a couple of applications with between 12 and 20 pushbutton inputs to show different clips, and I was interested in using the GPIO functionality of the units to allow us to easily replace the current controllers we have built in-house. Is this possible?

  (I've also posted a comment on the thread requesting a Mac version of Bright Author as this would be extra useful.)

  Thanks.

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  Michael April 10, 2012 14:49

  No problem Chris.  I'm not sure about GPIO, we have only used it for limited functionality - like selecting a language, or having a more easily accessible re-set button if the units in a cabinet or something, but nothing to that extent.  Lyndon would probably be better to answer that.  Best of luck on the project!

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  Lyndon April 11, 2012 14:54

  If you visit www.hms-electronics.com, you'll find they make some boards that use both gpio and serial on the brightsign to increase the # of gpios you can use. Anywhere from 16 inputs and 16 outputs to 64 inputs and 64 outputs.