Kukui Kup Continuous Display: What to Display?

With the conclusion of the WattDepot BioHeatMap gadget, I recently became involved in creating a billboard display for the Kukui Kup Competition. Ideally what this entails is a display for when students enter the lobby of their dorm, they can see various aspects of the competition such as dorm rankings, recent commitments, and upcoming events instantly as they walk by. This idea of a lobby display would be a cool addition to continually remind students to save energy and go green. Robert did some price comparing and this Samsung 46" LCD display seems sufficient to be the actual medium to display the billboard. It also features a built-in Windows computer as it will use a web browser to display content.

Tag teaming with the other gadget group, Jarret Mizo and Paul Galiza, Kendyll and I will be working together to create a functional mock-up for the billboard. To maximize development without worrying about cross-browser issues, we decided to develop everything using only one browser, the latest version of Firefox (3.6.3). Jarret recommended this plug-in: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1568 to install which removes the tabs at the top in Firefox when you Full Screen giving Firefox a clean look, which is a nice feature adding to the overall awesomeness of our developing billboard.

We'll post all of our functional mock-ups at a newly created Project Hosting site here.

In order to get a feel for the billboard I took a look at the mock-ups that were already done by a previous group here. It's got some great examples, especially the ones with the "Did You Know?", they'd make great transitions between the different set-ups. By the end of this week, we will have a functional mock-up of the possibly looking like the following:


The frameworks that we'll be using is a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since WattDepot already speaks Google Visualization, we'll mostly likely be using the Table Visualization to create any of the table data. Prof. Johnson also recommended some kind of ticker at the bottom of the page showing recent updates. I've been searching for an RSS Ticker that integrates nicely and this one: http://www.mioplanet.com/rsc/newsticker_javascript.htm looks promising.

Some modules I've been tossing back and forth with Kendyll are:

• RSS Integrated Ticker
• Display of Gauges, analogous to an International Wall of clocks
• Did You Know?