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UMass features football history with digital signage kiosk

Interactive touchscreen kiosk shows the 130-year history of the school's football program.

December 8, 2014

The University of Massachusetts in Amherst recently opened its Football Performance Center, a 55,000-square-foot facility representing the UMass Minutemen football program. Visitors are greeted by a hall of fame showcasing the university's 130-year football program as they enter the facility, and as part of the experience, the university has deployed an interactive digital signage kiosk to compile and present detailed information about the football program. A Carousel digital signage solution from Tightrope Media Systems was selected to address the challenge, featuring custom software-defined programming to bring decades of historical and current data together, according to an announcement from Tightrope.

The interactive kiosk catalogues a wide array of details and statistics related to the football program, showcasing players, teams, coaches, seasons and accomplishments. The system reaches beyond the realm of football action, generating information about the bands, mascots and other entries supporting the teams over the years. The system casts a wide net to assure that every visitor engaged with the kiosk will discover something of interest while controlling the touchscreen.

"We wanted a searchable system that delivered an interactive experience for current players, students, alumni, fans and visitors," UMass Assistant AD John Sinnett said in the announcement. "We faced the significant challenge of finding a system that could centralize 130 years of information, make it interactive and intelligently display a large amount of content in a sortable manner on demand. This is a homegrown system, and we're not aware of another university that offers anything similar. There's no question that this was a steep hill to climb."

Sinnett and his team engaged Tightrope to generate a custom program for pulling historical and recent content from various online sources, the announcement said. Driven by intelligent, automated software-defined triggers and a central content management system, the Carousel solution manages a giant block of XML data, extensively programmed to ensure the right information correlates with the right targets.

The system also provides staff with an intuitive interface to manually upload content, ensuring that missing details from player numbers and headshots to game stats and team descriptions can be edited or added on the fly.  The system is based on a scalable architecture powered by a single Carousel 330 server, capable of supporting 15 channels should the university choose to add more kiosks or displays in the future.

"The touchscreen is emblematic of the overall mission of the Football Performance Center," Sinnett said. "This venue ties in a large part of the program's history into a modern home that will be a future cornerstone of the program. Carousel is efficiently driving and disseminating information about the historical past and success of the program, while keeping visitors up to the date on the latest activities. Tightrope is helping us push that history forward, drawing in anyone with interest in our football program."