Kiosk Mode

Nothing in this section is specific to being in a planetarium! You can install WWT in kiosk mode anywhere you’d like.

AAS WorldWide Telescope can be launched in a kiosk mode, which is designed for unfacilitated use in museums or other informal learning environments. There are two general ways this can be done. One is to show a narrative presentation in the form of a tour. The other mode is to allow free exploration.

Unless you go to great lengths to harden your kiosk computer by installing software to intercept certain Windows keyboard commands, you should not have a publically-accessible keyboard connected. A connected keyboard gives the user the ability to Control-Alt-Delete to get task manager, which could break out of WWT and give access to the computer. For administration purposes, museum staff will want to be able to connect a keyboard or remote desktop to the computer to do this.

Kiosk Tours🔗

  1. Create or open your tour in WWT. Save it to a file at a folder on your PC.
  2. On the last slide of your tour Right-click and choose “Set Next Slide.” This will bring up a dialog box click the first slide of the tour. Clicking the slide will also check the box “Link to Slide (Selected below).” Click OK.
  3. Create a shortcut.
    1. Right-click at the location you want the shortcut to live and select “New/Shortcut”
    2. This will open a dialog box to type the location of the item. You can browse to the WWT install or if it is a standard installation, you can enter C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research\Microsoft WorldWide Telescope\WWTExplorer.exe. Don’t forget that the entire path should be enclosed in double quotes.
    3. Following the location for WWTExplorer.exe (which is the WWT application), you should put the location of the Kiosk Tour you created in the first step. In this example, the tour (named Kiosk Tour.wtt) is on the desktop for the user named Exhibit and the full path to the tour C:\Users\Exhibit\Desktop\Kiosk Tour.wtt.
    4. Following the path to the tour, put the flag that puts the application into the kiosk mode -kiosk.
    5. For the above example, the entire entry for the location of the item would be: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research\Microsoft WorldWide Telescope\WWTExplorer.exe" "C:\Users\Exhibit\Desktop\Kiosk Tour.wtt" -kiosk. When you are finished you might want to change the name of the shortcut to something relating to the tour, such as “Run Cool WWT Kiosk Tour,” otherwise it will default to the name “WWTExplorer.exe”.
    6. You can always change this by right-clicking on the shortcut and selecting “Properties”. In the dialog box that comes up you can edit the Target field.

Interaction in Kiosk Tours🔗

In all cases you should consider what interaction you want with the public to have with WWT. Possibilities are:

Auto-starting Tours on Startup🔗

  1. Setup auto-login for user running WWT.
  2. Setup shortcut to be executed on login