kiosk

I went back to Baltimore last weekend for a memorial service for a close friend and constant collaborator. It was the best I have attended.

There are few downsides to anonymous blogging. Here's item 2 from the list: 'inability to shout/blog the achievements and travails of friends and loved ones from rooftops'. It can hurt.

My friend was a music lover, something of an introvert, and beloved by other introverts. His wife had the keen idea of creating a series of listening stations around the memorial, thereby letting a room of introverts reflect quietly together.

I built ten of them. Each was a pair of Grado SR-60i headphones, a tablet machine with a dedicated listening station app, and a LEGO platform/dock/headphone stand. I learned a lot. I'll be happy if I can share ten percent.

The requirements were simple. The interface had to be simple and immersive. It had to make listeners feel a connection to my friend. The system had to be reliable. It had to be built in a space of just a couple of weeks.

The cheapest answer was to burn CDs with playlists and buy ten cheap discmen. I didn't think I could do immersive with discmen. I wanted visitors to read the band names and notice the wide age disparity evident in the tracks. I wanted them to read text about the playlists.

Climbing up the expense and difficulty ladder from a pile of junky discmen was probably a pile of iPod shuffles or nanos or any of thousands of Chinese clones. In truth, I hadn't actually touched a non-iOS iPod product in almost six years. The local Apple store still stocks them and had several on display. The nanos have been fancy touch screen devices for two generations now.

When I was a child, the dinosaurs were dead. No more. Now every pigeon fouling my slate is a fierce therapod. My world has changed completely and Jurassic Park is certainly the lesser for it. The marginal operating system that powered my original iPod never actually went away. It just turned into the software behind today's nano. The poor screen and poor software of the nano seemed unlikely to please the many savvy gadgeteers in attendance. The small size and small controls of the nano seemed unlikely to please a hypothetical technophobic Aunt Sally or Uncle Horace. After seeing, and rejecting, the real deal nano I didn't pursue any of the nano knockoffs.

By the way, a nano is $149. I'm clearly missing something. I have a house full of iPads, iPhones, Macbooks, and iMacs and I'm left scratching my head over that one. It must be a price point place holder for some new type of smart jewelry dongle.

Next up in price -- and one blonde wood table over -- was the fifth generation iPod touch. $229. Maybe the answer was ten of these. My experience with iOS has been generally good and I have no complaints about Apple's DAC selection or power sections. All the Apple gear I own can drive a decent set of headphones without an external headphone amplifier.

Though I like the devices, I don't actually like the music player app. Coverflow is as neat an effect as it ever was but it's a distraction when listening to someone elses's music. The playlist screen on my iPhone is an especially unstable point to hang an interface. From the playlist view, no play controls are available and a bunch of playlist edit controls appear.

These stations would ideally present a playlist and simple play controls and nothing else. No edit buttons. No bluetooth indicators or battery graphics or wifi beacons.

This is where the iOS devices start to run away from their hobbled iPod brethren. Mobile Safari supports full screen web apps pretty well. The app store is full of alternative webview wrappers that provide an even better experience. Most of these provide an HTML5 experience nearly on par with the built-in Safari.

That HTML5 experience, by the way, is getting pretty good. Apple's browser still seems far ahead of Chrome for Android and the antique browser native to Android. My testing showed HTML5 audio support to be much more robust. Mobile Safari also supports at least parts of the nascent 'web audio' standard for in-browser audio manipulation.

I mocked up some audio web apps for iPod touch-sized screens. I was confident that I could replicate most of the user interface of the built-in music app. I wasn't sure that I could use that screen size to build an interface that I liked that that worked for the memorial.

My friend was a reader. He read the Times while driving a small car at high speed and still somehow managed to die of leukemia first. He read the inane copy on the Chipotle burrito basket liners. He read terrible journal articles non-stop. He did a lot of that reading while listening. Jony Ive can probably pull off immersive on a four inch screen. He can probably do it on the head of a pin. I can't.

I needed a larger screen and I wanted an interface that was read and not merely seen. I wanted it to evoke paper or a vintage computer terminal. For about two cents per station and the price of a glue stick I could have tacked a sheet of actual paper to a discman and called it a day. Readable, but not immersive.

I wanted to capture listeners for at least an entire track. I wasn't trying to sell the music. I was trying to reveal the soundscape that had been under those headphones for all those years. If ever Aunt Sally had been curious about the goings on, this was the time to find out. I couldn't mock up a sheet of text that I could imagine holding a grazing listener's attention for three minutes.

The interface wizards at Bally Midway know a thing or two about capturing an audience. I used a trick from them and built an 'attract' screen from a collection of quotes from my friend's correspondence. The excerpts rotated through the bottom corner of the display at about thirty second intervals. This detail provided reading, immersion, and a connection to my friend.

This was all the more reason for a bigger screen. I first considered E-Ink readers. These are still available. Nearly all have a six inch screen. A few years ago, each had a primitive web browser and an mp3 player. In the last couple of generations, all seem to have shed their headphone jacks and audio features. Some, like the Nook Simple, have even shed their experimental web browser. Too bad.

Next up was tablets. The iPad has all the same advantages as the iPod touch and offers the bigger screen I was looking for. Better still, I already had four of them that could be used for the project.

The iPod touch shares a screen size and resolution with its iPhone cousins. The most recent models offer 326 pixels per inch (ppi). The iPad mini offers 163 ppi. The original iPad and iPad 2 offer 132 ppi. The more recent full-size iPads offer 264 ppi.

I notice a big difference between the 264 ppi of the Retina display models and the 163 ppi of the mini. In particular, I noticed a big difference between these screens when I looked at the green text on a black background of my prototype interface.

Let's just recap. My opening position was $10 discmen and I'm now debating the text quality of devices that Apple sells new for anywhere from  $329 to almost $1000? Yeah.

Once I got past discmen, I started to be concerned that I was going to wind up with a giant and expensive pile of ewaste on my hands and conscience. A non-retina iPad would have been fine for this purpose. Three of the tablets that wound up in the final lineup were non-retina iPads. They were iPads I already owned. I couldn't bring myself to buy another non-retina iOS device.

This is when I looked into rental. It turns out that a lot of local and nationwide firms rent iPads for events. I decided to just rent six iPad 3 tablets and use four iPads I already owned. I got a quote in about a half an hour and I decided just as hastily that I wasn't doing that. A four-day rental for six iPad 2 tablets was going to cost $150 apiece!

I could wrap my mind around a $750 charge for this project for tablets. I couldn't wrap my mind around the usury. Getting hung up on this point is the only thing I really felt that I did wrong in the project. I should have rented the iPads. It would have probably cost less than the rented tablecloths.

$150 turned out to be a magic number. It's within a dollar of the current price of the Barnes & Noble Nook HD+ tablet. I don't claim to understand the Nook ecosystem. I didn't need to. B&N built themselves a very inexpensive 9 inch tablet that includes 16GB of flash for $269. You should expect some compromises for that low price. The tablet is wrapped in plastic, not unibody aluminum. It has no cameras or GPS. What you don't expect is the beautiful 256 ppi display.

The Nook rocks a screen almost as large and as dense as the Retina iPad for less than half the list price. B&N sweetened the deal further by lopping an extra $110 off the price and throwing in access to the Google Play store. 256 ppi in a 9 inch tablet for $80 less than the cheapest iPod touch and $1 less than a four-day iPad 2 rental.

I bought five.

You are reading this article after Google's announcement of their new, high-DPI nexus 7 tablet. It starts at $229. I didn't buy it because it didn't exist. I don't know how it would have changed my thinking.

At this point, the tentative device lineup included iPads generation one, two, and three running iOS 5 and 6 and now Nooks running Android 4.x.

All that remained was the construction of the listening stations themselves and a simple matter of programming. The stations were less scary than the software. I started there.

I had recently admired the Apple store listening stations built to showcase the traditional iPod lineup. I passed on the iPods themselves, but the stations were tasteful. I just didn't know how I could quickly duplicate them. While wondering, I passed a LEGO store.

Frequent readers know that LEGO has many roles in my household. I'm not a fetishist. I don't collect sets. It's just a medium where I find expression comfortable. The store stocked black bricks and tiles in the bulk section where parts are sold by volume. I was expecting to sketch out parameters and dimensions, but I wound up with a design I liked. The result was a LEGO baseplate covered with black tile. A tablet dock and a headphone stand rise above the tile. Small red tiles provide an accent and add an element of 1980's arcade cabinet glamour.

listening station prototype

The LEGO bulk purchase system works by volume. The volume you fill is plastic cups that would not be out of place in a frozen yogurt joint. It is a tedious exercise to pack bricks into these cups. I think it would have easily cost a thousand dollars to buy enough LEGO for ten of these stations if purchased that way.

nine stations in a row

I learned that the bulk bins are filled from boxes of LEGO which are themselves available for sale. Any of the bricks on their bulk wall are available by the crate for $70. I bought most of the LEGO this way.

At this point, it may seem pointlessly decadent to have built the final stands in LEGO instead of wood. LEGO turns out to be the right answer. I had a chance to test the stations in the event space just a couple of days before the event. Space for the dedicated table I had imagined was going to be tight. The venue did have a bar rail along a wall that was available. The rail was sturdy, but not deep enough to hold the tablets by themselves, let alone the headphones behind. I made some measurements and rebuilt the LEGO to fit the rail. Tablet and headphones were mounted side-by-side on a new station platform that was shaped to clear the lip of the bar rail and cantilever beyond. The tablets were actually dangling over concrete supported by nothing but LEGO. In the new design, all the stations were assembled together into a linear monolith about twenty feet long.

Beep. You have reached the end of side A of the blog. Flip the blog over, and wait a few days, for the story of the software and pictures of the final installation.