SOFTWARE

All of our software was originally developed for use in a museum environment, with entertaining and educating the public as the primary goal, with a special focus on students from 3rd - 8th grade. In addition, each of the programs have been featured in an exhibit and used by countless visitors at Houston Museum Of Natural Science, our project partners. That means that all of our software has been designed to run as a stand-alone kiosk, with beautiful graphics and intuitive user interfaces that quickly engage the museum visitor.

The rule-of-thumb for a museum exhibit has been said to be "if you can keep a visitor interested for at least 2 minutes, they will learn". Our software has proven that it can keep visitors interacting for much longer. While all of our software is suitable in a museum, a few programs have proven themselves especially robust and useful...

Space Update A suite of four applications that together explore space science beyond the reaches of Earth. Astronomy Update covers stars, galaxies, nebluae and much more. Sky Tonight shows the stars overhead any day of the year for your latitude. Solar System Update explores our local planets, comets and asteroids. Space Weather investigates aurora, solar flares, and magnetospheric physics. Also included is our Tic·Tac·Toe game ready to challenge you with what you've learned. Each application can run stand-alone or together as a complete package.

MediaShow Pro This feature rich software application uses a button-box interface to control the display of images, image sequences, and movies in a separate display window. Its rich feature set allows complete configuration control over image zooms and rotations, and movie start and stop times. MediaShow Pro is a full windowed application best used in setups with 2 video outputs (e.g. a laptop hooked to an LCD projector with a fisheye lens or mirror-system.

MediaShow-Mirror | MediaShow-Mirror-1024 Single display setups (e.g. laptops running a projector through video-mirroring) can use MediaShow-Mirror. This version has a 1400x60 pixel control window locked to the top of the display, moving it out of view for most dome projections, with the display window filling the remainder of the view. It has only limited access to playback presets and controls. MediaShow-Mirror-1024 is similar but only 1024 pixels wide for even smaller display setups.

Marquee Marquee is a dual-display kiosk application to showcase shows and events for a museum, planetarium or other exhibit installation. Users flip through poster thumbnails which when chosen shows descriptive information on display 1 and either a movie or image sequence on display 2. Its intended use is as a COMING SOON or NOW PLAYING kiosk to showcase events for planetariums and museums.

Survey App | Survey Editor Survey App and its companion Editor are great tools for museums to quickly create interactive kiosks to gather visitor responses or test basic knowledge. Users interact with a simple interface posing questions with multiple choice answers. All the user input data is tracked and written periodically to an external tab-delimited text file that can easily be imported into a spreadsheet program for analysis. Great for getting feedback as visitors leave an exhibit!

Tic·Tac·Toe | Tic·Tac·Toe Editor A version of the classic board game of X's and O's that comes ready with built in game question sets for Space Update and Earth Update content. Also available are question sets for Space Weather, Mars, Ham Radio and TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills). The companion Editor can be used to edit any question set or create your own game from any content you choose. While a simple game, it has proven very effective in engaging museum visitors.