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Ballantines Whisky

One of my more recent projects has finally come to fruition - a touchscreen kiosk for Ballantines Whisky. This kiosk features a webcam for users to take their picture, then incorporate onto a postcard design, for printing out, via the kiosk printer.

Work began late last year, and after jumping through many hoops and wiring (both metaphorically and physically) many disparate elements together, the kiosk arrived at its first venue of Madrid airport on 1st June 2008.

Every month or so, the kiosk will be moved to a different airport around Europe. The next destination is Frankfurt, after that, who knows?

I have to say I'm pretty proud of what was achieved. The main front end is done in Flash, while under the hood, PHP, MySQL and ImageMagick allow the picture to be taken, saved, and manipulated, thanks to the special effects and color filters that are available to the user.

The tricky part was translating a screen capture into a 300dpi print job. That amount of pixel wrestling takes time to assemble, so it had to be ready in time for the screen in which printing begins. A last minute bodge to insert the webcam at a 90 degree angle, due to lack of room in the kiosk meant scouring the Actionscript references for a quick way of re-orienting the webcam image back to its proper viewpoint onscreen.

If you're travelling around Europe, keep an eye out for a large blue kiosk, it looks a bit like the Tardis, from a distance. You'll only find it airside, so you'll need to be partaking a bit of air travelling. My website has some screen captures from the kiosk, I'll soon get some photos of the kiosk itself soon.
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