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| Aaron Caine (left) and Jeffrey Albro Photo by Vernon Doucette |
See me, touch me
Aaron Caine and Jeffrey Albro designed and built this touch-sensitive directory information system for ENG's department of electrical and computer engineering (ECE). Mounted on a wall outside Room 324 in the Photonics Building, the 42-inch plasma touch screen displays biographical information about many faculty and graduate students in the department. The directory resembles a Web page: tapping on different icons reveals faculty photographs, research interests, and office locations. “It's a really valuable resource,” says Caine (ENG'01), the department's systems manager, “because after the office closes, there are many students who come in to meet with professors and teaching fellows, and the directory helps them find their offices.” Caine and Albro, a systems administrator for the department, finished the touch screen last May in time for the annual ECE day, when seniors present their capstone projects to colleagues, faculty, and representatives from industry. The idea for the touch screen originated more than a year ago, when a professor assigned a team of ECE seniors to write the computer code for a tangible directory. Caine and Albro took over midway to handle technical challenges. Similar plasma touch screens already are on the market, Caine says, but most are built with a thin layer of glass too delicate for a public setting. “This one needed to withstand having a can of soda hurled at it, and not explode,” Caine says. So they covered the fragile plasma screen with a thick layer of safety glass outfitted with infrared sensors to detect touch and sealed it with water-resistant weather stripping.
Caine hopes to see similar touch screens, which cost about $10,000, in use elsewhere on campus. “We would love to assist other departments in setting up touch screens like this one,” he says. “You could put a screen like this in the GSU with a card swiper on it for adding points to your ID card.” Other applications could include registering for classes, a student directory in the GSU, or campus maps. “We really haven't taken full advantage of it, particularly because we don't have the ability to assign full-time personnel to it,” he says. “But if we had additional resources, there's a whole lot more that could be done.” The touch screens could also be useful outdoor information kiosks. According to Caine, “With another $250 to $500 worth of work, you could put this outside.” An interactive flatscreen map of the University, mounted outside of Warren Towers, say, could help visitors navigate the campus. Best of all, the touch sensors adapt to unpredictable conditions on a streetscape: the intelligent software would learn to ignore anomalies on the screen, such as a wad of chewing gum stuck to the glass or a wayward snowball.
16 January 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations