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Take a plasma-screen, invent a possiblity to add an internal computer, add a modem (analog or ISDN) and you got yourself a city-wide infomercial network.

We tried to establish this new platform in Karlsruhe, Germany.


  

I worked about 5 month for cityscreen. In this time i programmed:

• A very nice PowerPoint^®-alike software with countless animation-features, a precise timeline, seamless videoplayback and a antialiased text-scroller at the bottom.
  The text-scroller took information-tags from the local database. It could even show the current ticking time and never miss a frame (even while a video was playing)
• Several services that took statistical data (like finances or weather forecast) and rendered very nice looking animated charts.
  Because the weather-service we used could only send automated FAXes, i built an highly experimental FAX-to-OCR-to-Service-bridge that intristingly never failed.
• A central server that decided on a very intelligent basis if it's needed to dial out to a station to update animations or download logfiles. The decision that we dial out to the client-screens was based on the fact that we did not want to pay the clients for that, too.
  We had a special ISDN-card that could service 8 B-channels at once (so i could dial out to 8 different stations at once). By the end i had more or less written my own drivers because the ones that came with that thing were extremly buggy.

The Company went bankrupt after some grave mis-decisions by the management. But it was interesting nevertheless, i even recorded and mixed a radio-commercial for cityscreen that aired at the local radio-station. ⎆home ⎆top