Another big advantage of our system is the possibility to expand the setup and to observe multiple participants simultaneously (e.g. to observe how they work on the same document in a network).

If you have already a fixed lab, you only need a second
- camera
- microphone
- Digital Recording Box
and a third computer monitor to do that.
Example for a fixed usability lab
Setup:
The monitor signal of the PCs goes into the screen recorders and are recorded as MPEG 4 files. During the test session, the signals are loopthroughed
and displayed live on the monitors in the control room.
The audio signal goes from the microphone into each digital camcorder. The video and audio signal from each digital camera goes via FireWire into the recording PC and is recorded as a digital file.
Your recording PC is connected with the screen recorders via an ethernet cable to control the screen recorders (Start/stop recording, transfer MPEG files).
The participant videos and the "Spectator" software are displayed on the third monitor of the recording PC simultaneously.

Perform a session:
During the session the videos (monitor and participant) are recorded and synchronized.You can code the behaviors and mark interesting scenes with the short cuts you defined in the configuration of the Spectator software. When you stop the recording the monitor video recorded on the screen recorder will be automatically transferred to your recording PC.

Play & Edit:
After the session you can use the software to play the synchronized videos again (slow motion support), edit your codings you've made during the session, insert additional comments etc.

Share your results:
You can bundle the videos and your codings on a CD (one click) with the free "Spectator Player" software and distribute the CDs so everybody can watch the interesting scenes using the bookmarks you've made in the videos.

Additional equipment:
To expand the standard system shown above you can obtain additional equipment.

A pan-tilt camera holder for the camera
A pan-tilt control panel to control the pan-tilt camera holder
A push-to-talk microphone to communicate with the participant
An additional video monitor to share the participants video image (useful for multiple observers)
An additional PC monitor to share the live monitor image (useful for multiple observers)

If you have questions or comments, please don't hesitate to use the following e-mail address:
info@usability.biobserve.com
Modified: Fri, May 19, 2006

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