ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the humble kiosk can be transformed into a dynamic medium for entertainment, education, information, and social interaction. The electronic kiosk had a humble beginning, devised for an entirely pragmatic purpose: to reduce the number of tellers in banks. The housing for the four kiosks had a distinctive feature in common as well: the main body of all four models resembled Mickey Mouse. A project called An Imagined Place is an excellent example of how the basic kiosk can be enriched by using sophisticated technologies. The technology for producing a project like Virtual Luxor would seem to be extremely expensive and perhaps difficult to execute, but Roach asserts that this is no longer the case. Certainly one of the most unique examples of kiosk technology is the robotic kiosk project known as PEBBLES. The kiosk can readily be combined with other technologies to give users unique kinds of experiences.
