What can I do to meet your needs, Katie?

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I’m back to the sales calls, this time for Video Management Systems, the back-end software that will coordinate all our cameras. This field seems more competitive than that of eye tracking, or maybe there is just more demand, as VMS is what runs your basic surveillance system you find anywhere from the convenience store to the casino. So people are scrambling for our business.

However, whenever we try to describe what we’re doing and what our needs are, we run into some problems. You want to record audio? Well, that’s illegal in surveillance systems (it’s ok for research as long as you get consent), so it’s not something we deal a lot with. Don’t mount your camera near a heating or cooling vent or it will drown out the video. The microphones on the cameras are poor, and by the way, it doesn’t sync correctly with the video – “it’s like watching a bad Godzilla movie,” said the engineer we spoke with this morning. You want to add criteria to flag video and grab certain pieces? Well, you can’t access the video stream because if you do, then it’s not forensically admissable and can’t be used in court (Ok, we just need an exported copy, we’re not going to prosecute anyone even if they chew gum in the Visitor Center). You want to record high-resolution images? Well, you can either buy a huge amount of storage or a huge amount of processing capability. Minor obstacles, really, but a lot of decision points, even more than eye trackers. Again, though, it’s a learning experience in itself, so hopefully we’re generating some data that will save someone else some time in the future.

The pricing and purchasing is a bit strange, too. The companies seem to all have “sales” teams, but many can’t actually sell anything more than the software, some don’t even sell their software directly. Instead, we have to deal then with retailers and sometimes “integrators” that can sell us hardware, too, or at least specify requirements for us. Then there’s the matter of cameras – we haven’t decided on those, either, and it’s becoming clear that we’ll have several different types of cameras. Juggling all these decisions at once is quite a trick, literally.

At least it’s a moderately amusing process; many of the sales folks are here or were visiting in the Northwest recently, and we’ve commiserated over the last week about all the rain/snow/ice that ground the area to a halt from Seattle to Eugene.

 

The continuing case for stalking visitors

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Beverly Serrell, a pioneer in tracking museum visitors (or stalking them, as some of us like to say), has just released a nice report on the Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) web site. In “Paying More Attention to Paying Attention,” Serrell describes the growing use of metrics she calls tracking and timing (T&T) in the museum field since the publication of her book on the topic in 1998. As the field has more widely adopted these T&T strategies, Serrell has continued her work doing meta-analysis of these studies and has developed a system to describe some of the main implications of the summed findings for exhibition design.

I’ll leave you to read the details, but it really drove home to me the potential excitement and importance of the cyberlab’s tracking setup. Especially for smaller museums that have minimal staff, implementing an automatic tracking schemes, even on a temporary basis, could save a lot of person-hours in collecting this simple, yet vital data about exhibition and exhibit element use. It could allow more data collection of this type in the prototyping stages, especially, which might yield important data on the optimum density of exhibit pieces before a full exhibition is installed. On the other hand, if we can’t get it to work, or our automated design proves ridiculously unwieldy (stay tuned for some upcoming posts on our plans for 100 cameras in our relatively-small 15000 square foot space), it will only affirm the need for good literal legwork that Serrell also notes is a great introduction to research for aspiring practicioners. In any case, the eye tracking as an additional layer of information that we use to help explain engagement and interest in particular exhibit pieces might lead eventually to a measure that lends more insight into Serrell’s Thorough Use.

(Thanks to the Museum Education Monitor and Jen Wyld for the tip about this report.)

 

Snow on the beach

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Last night brought something we don’t see all that often in Newport: snow.  I don’t mean freezing rain or a brief dusting of wet fluff, either.  The street outside received a solid, inch-thick sheet of the stuff, which remained pristine for a considerable length of time.

Late last night, we could hear snowball fights echoing through the frigid air.  A neighborhood dog, donning a striped sweater, followed her family into the orange glow of the streetlights to play.

At around 1:30 a.m., my wife and I managed to get a few photos of a snowy Nye Beach.  I’ve attached the clearest of these below.

What does this drywall sound like?

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Mogees is a gestural touch interface system developed by Bruno Zamborlin.  It works with any contact microphone and rigid surface.  The actual resonance of the surface affects the sound, plus the system recognizes the kind of contact the user is making (tapping, scratching, slapping etc.).   In other words, it can turn just about anything into a hybrid digital/physical instrument and an innovative touch interface.  Watch the video for examples, including some cool echoey effects from a balloon.

Meditations on the pace of research

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Dr. Rowe advises several students each year, from many of the programs on campus that have education tracks as well as the main Science and Math Education Free-Choice Learning program. We meet as a group regularly, and yesterday we got into the subject of time management. Dr. Rowe has responsibilities both as a professor and as the Interim Director of Education for Oregon Sea Grant, and he was sharing that in the face of his administrative responsibilities, especially, the “research activities” often get pushed to the side.

As a PhD candidate, I am in the process of tweaking my proposal to send to my committee. Yet it is so much more tempting to spend my time doing things for the development of the cyberlab tools, which I am paid to spend about 20 hours a week on. To me, right now, it seems so much more concrete and efficient. For example, for my proposal, I’ve just spent about half an hour in a frustrating (and so far, futile) search on the web and in the school library for an article to cite for a fact that I know but haven’t had to cite in a while. If I had spent a half hour updating the inventory database for the lab, however, I would have tangible results in the form of organized entries for a number of our new technology items.

Forcing myself to write or revise is a chore, but ultimately, when I get into it, intellectually rewarding, aside from the futile citation searches. Breaking writing tasks down into more manageable chunks than “write a research proposal” seems to be a lot harder than seeing the finite chunks for the lab development. What other strategies do we use as researchers to be sure to make research progress and not let things “drag” on our to-do lists as we accomplish more obvious, yet perhaps less important, tasks?