So the deeper I go, the bigger my spreadsheet gets. I decided today it made sense to split it into four: 1) one with all of the information for each company, basically what I already have, 2) one with just company info, such as email, contact person, and warranty, 3) one with the information for the tabletop or user-seated systems, and 4) one with just the information for the glasses-based systems. For one thing, now I can still read the spreadsheets if I print them out in landscape orientation. However, since I want to keep the data in the single original spreadsheet as well, I am not sure if I’m going to have to fill in two boxes each time I get a new answer at this point or if I can link the data to fill in automatically. I’m pretty sure you can do this with Excel, but so far, not sure about GoogleDocs.
I also keep finding new companies to contact – four more just today. At least I feel like I’m getting more of a handle on the technology. Too bad the phone calls always go a little differently and I never remember to get all my questions asked (especially because our cordless phone in the office keeps running out of battery after about 30 minutes, cutting some of my conversations short!). Oh well, that’s what email followup is for. None of the companies seem to specialize in any particular area around eye tracking, and none have reports or papers to point to, other than snippets of testimonials. Their web sites are all very sales-oriented.
In other news, I’m a little frustrated with some of the customer service. Some companies have been very slow to respond, and when they do, they don’t actually set an appointment as I requested, but just say “I’ll call you today.” My schedule and workday is such that I run around a lot, and I don’t want to be tethered to the phone. We don’t have voicemail, and these companies are the ones who don’t answer straight off, but ask for a phone number to call you back. Another company tried to tell me that the visitors to the science center wouldn’t want their visit interrupted with helping us out to do research, even though the calibration time on the glasses was less than a minute. I just had to laugh and tell him I was quite familiar with visitor refusals! In fact, I have a whole post on that to write up for the blog from data I collected this summer.
The good news is, I think we’ll be able to find a great solution, especially thanks to matching funds from the university if we share the equipment with other groups that want to use it (which will be an interesting experiment in and of itself). Also, surprisingly, there are some solutions for between $5 – $10 K, as opposed to the $25 – 45 K with software that some of the companies have. I’m not entirely sure of the differences, yet, but it’s nice to know you don’t have to have a *huge* grant to get started on something like this.
