Deploying a Promethist kiosk
The plain-language introduction — how a kiosk is assembled on real hardware, on site or streamed, and how to build the operator tablet if you want one.
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This guide was written by Claude and reviewed by our developers. It is long, and intentionally so — it is a reference to revisit, not to read in one sitting. Expect to work through it over several days, tackling sections as you reach them. It spans five trades: Unreal, web development, security, networking and physical installation. We do not assume you know all five. Almost nobody does, and unfamiliar parts are written to be readable. Feeding a section to Claude or another assistant to unpack confusing bits is a perfectly sensible way to read this — not a failure of understanding. If something remains unclear, our writing is at fault; tell us and we will fix it. |
Most of this is optional
We actually give you just one thing: the ability to put a conversational avatar in an Unreal application — one that listens, thinks and talks back. That is the PromethistLink plugin, and it is the only part you could not build yourself. It handles the microphone, the backend connection, the returning speech, and the avatar’s face and voice.
Everything else here — the kiosk shapes, the operator tablet, the streaming setup, the lockdown scripts — is one worked example of how to deploy that, documented so you do not have to reinvent it. If you are building a talking Unreal application and already know how to ship it, take the plugin and skip perhaps 95% of what follows: read what the thing is, what the plugin needs from your project and wiring it up in Blueprints, then stop. Those three are all you need to put a talking avatar in an Unreal application.
The rest is for when you are building a kiosk and prefer not to repeat our mistakes.
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Unreal is the engine we ship, not the only one this can run on. The operator tablet, the control channel and the supervisor communicate with whatever program holds the conversation via a documented WebSocket protocol. A Unity host is currently being written against it, and your own engine can be too. Nothing on the tablet or supervisor side changes when the engine does. See Writing your own host and the wire protocol. |
What you are actually signing up for
If you build the full system, this is the work — five jobs, in the order you encounter them. Each is a different trade with its own section below. Use this as a checklist of things not to forget.
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1 · Unreal. Get the plugin into a project, wire the component up, and get a packaged build onto a machine. → what the plugin needs from your project, then wiring it up in Blueprints
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2 · Pick a deployment shape. Where the two screens plug in, and whether Unreal runs on site or elsewhere. Everything following depends on this answer. → where the two screens plug in
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3 · The operator tablet (optional). A web page for whoever manages the kiosk. Use ours, fork it, or skip it entirely. → five minutes to a running tablet, then designing your own
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4 · Lock it down. Set the control-channel token, and — if you stream — decide who can open the stream at all. This is the step people skip, and the one with real consequences. → locking the control channel
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5 · Make it survive being unattended. Supervisors that restart things, a browser visitors cannot escape, and something sensible on screen when the kiosk is out of service. → what to run it all on, opening the page, blackout
Verify everything with before you ship — the same list, framed as tests rather than tasks.
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Where things live. This guide covers the entire system, so it sits with the Unreal side in the promethist-unreal repository. It was written when the tablet and Unreal sides shared a folder, so unqualified paths — |
The Promethist Touch documentation is the full tablet reference. It contains the wire protocol for anyone writing their own host — whether Unity or a panel of physical buttons — and how to drive the kiosk from hardware instead of a screen. You need none of it to get something running today.
The ecosystem’s third component is Promethist Watchdog, which keeps programs running when nobody is present to notice them stop. It is a general Windows supervisor — it knows nothing of kiosks, avatars or this protocol, supervising any program you target. It belongs here because an unattended kiosk is exactly what it was built for: it restarts the Unreal client and tablet browser side by side upon a crash or frozen window, and emails you when it acts.