A kiosk application for employees of Charles Schwab to record a video describing their contribution to the history of the company.
Created as Software Engineer at Intouch Interactive.
This project was requested by the customer to provide video capture for an important anniversary event where a large number of employees would be attending. Users were urged to give anecdotes about working at Charles Schwab.
The primary workhorse to capture and process video was LEADTOOLS Multimedia toolkit, an SDK that leveraged ActiveX to manipulate the webcam video and encoding via JavaScript. Video files were captured as 30-second recording sessions and copied to a local directory where files would be uploaded for further post-processing by the customer.
The fundamental workflow is a single-page application (SPA) coupled with JavaScript routing to help with navigation to specific sections. Manual testing was an extremely fast process due to the ability to jump to specific routes. This allowed for bypassing the repetitive task of moving navigation forward. Normally, SiteKiosk would handle customizing the on-screen keyboard behavior but the custom keyboard for this project was implemented in HTML and JavaScript.
While it would be tempting to use HTML5's getUserMedia() to reproduce this in today's browser climate, LEADTOOLS gave an impressive amount of flexibility for codec choices between audio and video. There were so many variants that it became very easy to create files that weren't properly MP4. Finding the right combination was a challenge but it didn't take long to find something the customer could utilize.
Technologies used on this project
General concepts
Application-specific