Web development in public spaces - Otis College's lobby displays show work from students and ongoing events around campus.

The web page's place has moved beyond its origins. What once used to only exist on our home and work computer monitors, now can be found on mobile devices and on public space displays.


Why use a canned software solution when it's so easy to use HTML to brand your own interface? The hardest part for us in developing this was keeping the data fresh. Otis events are added through the website's content management system, so we needed a way for the lobby display's web interface to access the site's back end database where the event information was held.

A little Ajax and PHP solves this. The PHP returns a javascript array of event ids from the database that the interface uses to call in information from Otis event URLs. After the system loops through all of the ids in the array, the main interface makes a new Ajax call accessing a replacement array of "fresh" ids thereby keeping the events fresh and alleviating the need for us to "refresh" the page on the display, which would be impossibly cumbersome.