[vcf-midatlantic] Update, museum tablets

[Evan Koblentz]

Here's an update on the tablet project that I mentioned a while ago.

We made simple card-stock signs for all of the microcomputer shortly 
before VCF East last spring. The signs looked decent and served their 
purpose.

However, after a few months, the signs began to show their age and we 
realized it's a hassle to make changes. We also started to realize they 
looked sort of amateur-ish. So we decided to experiment with tablets.

Simple tablets cost as little as $50-$60 and have tolerable specs for 
Android and our low requirements (run a browser, maybe play an A/V file 
here and there).

I bought an Amazon Kindle Fire 7. It's a decent little tablet, but 
Amazon customizes it too much. You can't run Google Play apps without 
all kinds of complicated changes. I'm returning it tomorrow.

In its place, I bought an Insignia (BestBuy house brand) 8" tablet. $60 
and pure Android.

I examined 20-something apps that do kiosk mode and/or parental control. 
Settled on an app called Fully Web Browser. It's inexpensive, easy to 
configure, and locks down everything except whatever domains/features 
that we white-list. Home button, hidden address bar, password-protected 
settings, even the power/volume buttons are locked down. It would be 
impossible for a museum visitor to do ANYTHING except what we 
specifically allow.

The idea (as most of you know by now) is to install one tablet for every 
two display carts in our microcomputer exhibit. Each cart has 
upper/lower artifacts. The tablet screens will be divided into four 
quadrants. Visitors touch the quadrant corresponding with the artifact. 
I'm writing the web page so they can touch anywhere in the quadrant; it 
doesn't have to be on the actual contents (thanks to a trick in the <td> 
tag: <td onclick="location.href='yourpage.html'"> which supercedes using 
standard hyperlinks for the cell contents.)

Up top there's a headline: "Press a box to learn more about the 
artifacts." On bottom are our Twitter/Facebook handles. Pressing a box 
makes that box go full-screen with info about the artifact. The top 
headline changes to, "Press here to return to the menu" and the bottom 
social media info stays the same.

I ordered a case for the tablet. If it works well, then we'll determine 
a system for mounting them to the carts. And if THAT works well, then 
we'll bulk-purchase the rest of the tablets/cases. We already have funds 
budgeted for this.

The simplicity of paper signs has some merits, but let's face it, this 
is 2016 and we need to have modern artifact presentation and 
interpretation. Using a slick kiosk app on tablets will be welcoming to 
our visitors, will make young people feel more comfortable in our 
learning environment, will impress InfoAge management, and (along with 
the two TVs we installed) will raise the bar for InfoAge museums in 
general. I am very excited about this project! We'll post some video 
when the first beta is installed.