The IP telephony system runs on Cisco's CallManager call processing software. Unified messaging capabilities are enabled via the company's Unity software. The museum has 165 Cisco IP phones distributed throughout its main and branch office locations.
To provide visitors with a more interactive experience, the museum purchased 17 multimedia kiosks. With the help of Key Information Systems (KIS, www.keyisit.com), a systems integration firm, the museum rolled out 13 kiosks by press time, with plans to implement the remaining four in the near future.
The kiosks are distributed throughout two floors of the museum. These kiosks have touchscreens that guide users through the system. Each kiosk has four different streaming audio/video presentations and a set of headphones for visitors to listen to the audio portion. The videos provide additional information on specific items in the museum's collection, such as historical background, depictions of the region where an item originated, and the work's significance in Asian culture.
KIS handled all aspects of the multimedia kiosk development project, including system design, the establishment of the system's database, development of the required applications, encoding of the video, and hardware deployment.
The streaming media runs on IBM's Content Manager and VideoCharger, the company's real-time streaming media platform, which is hosted on a dedicated server. The data stream is sent from the server to a Cisco switch located in the data-wiring closet on each floor. It then makes its way to client software on the appropriate kiosk. This software selects and controls the playback of the data stream.
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