Does anyone have experience using location information in a kiosk experience? I’d imagine hardware integration would be part of this, but we have a client request to display how far the touch screen is from a specific location as part of the experience. The touch screen is being deployed in a mobile marketing unit, so it’s information that we’d need to update automatically instead of being manually entered every time.
Thank you for any help you can give!
Hi David @sikes,
Can you tell us more about the kiosk hardware itself? Windows based or tablets with embedded GPS chip?
How precise do you need to be located?
How do you intend to let the user visualize “how far the touch screen is from a specific location”?
Seb
Hey @Seb. Thank you for the reply. The kiosk hardware is a simple Samsung chromebox. It doesn’t have any integrated GPS, if that capability is readily available without any custom development work, we’d buy whatever hardware is necessary. It needs to be only somewhat accurate—say, within a quarter mile. The point is just to show how central the event we are promoting is to the city we are marketing in. We intend to visualize it by saying something like “The location of the event is only {x} miles away from here” or something like that.
I had a look at the HTML 5 geolocation feature and on my laptop, with no built-in GPS, I couldn’t get a precise location. This is based on the internet provider, and in my case gave a result hundred of miles away from my location.
We do have some customers using real GPS position (check this thread) from either an Android device or an iPad. This is the best option for moving devices.
In your case, since you are talking about a kiosk, I guess it has a fixed position, no? You could enter its position (latitude/longitude) in an Excel file when setting it up.
Can you tell me more about the usage scenario for this Chromebox?
I appreciate you looking into this! The Chromebox and touchscreen are on a mobile marketing unit, deployed inside a large van, so the location will change nearly every day. If there’s not an out-of-the-box way for getting this set up, it’s not a huge deal. But thank you for looking into it!