Category Archives: Equipment

The best-laid plans

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As Mark noted, all three wave tanks are now in. Months of planning and design come to fruition … almost. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional layout failed to account for the placement of the table legs under the tanks. The proposed situations of the tanks put their legs right on top of the trenches in the floor, which won’t work due to a need to access the trenches for drainage and other water issues.

 

Whoops! So, things were quickly rearranged on the spot, which is pretty much always the way of things in the museum exhibit world.

The one tank that we let visitors play with revealed a host of issues of its own, including kids climbing onto the tank table and kids vigorously slamming the wave-making handle back and forth. No major injuries, but plenty of “alternative affordances” – creative, unanticipated use of the exhibit. So we’ve pulled it from visitor use for now for a bit of redesign.

In other planning news, we are replacing a well-planned video exhibit that had three vertical screens with the video stretched across them with one. Again, planning called for a cool three-screen timed animation that never came to fruition, so we are retrofitting, as it were.

 

Call it “make it work” Monday?

The End of the Road?

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We heard recently that our developer contractors have decided they have to abandon their efforts to make the first facial recognition system they investigated work. It was a tough call; they had put a lot of effort into it, thinking many times if they could just tweak this and alter that, they would get better performance than 60%. Alas, they finally decided it was not going to happen, at least without a ridiculous amount of further effort for the eventual reward. So, they are taking a different tack, starting over, almost, though they have lots of lessons learned from the first go-round.

I think this indecision about when it makes sense to try and fix the leaking ship vs. abandon ship and find another is a great parallel with exhibit development. Sometimes, you have a great idea that you try with visitors, and it flops. You get some good data, though, and see a way you can try it again. You make your changes. It flops again, though maybe not quite as spectacularly. Just enough better to give you hope. And so on … until you have to decide to cut bait and either redesign something for that task entirely or, if you’re working with a larger exhibition, find another piece to satisfy whatever learning or other goals you had in mind for the failed piece.

In either situation, it’s pretty heartbreaking to let go of all that investment. When I first started working in prototyping, this happened to our team designing the Making Models exhibition at the Museum of Science, Boston. As an intern, I hadn’t invested anything in the failed prototype, but I could see the struggle in the rest of the team, and it made such an impression that I recall it all these years later. Ultimately, the final exhibit looks rather different from what I remember, but its success is also a testament to the power of letting go. Hopefully, we’ll eventually experience that success with our facial recognition setups!

The eyetracker is here! … well, sort of.

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Our actual eyetracker is a bit backordered, so we’ve got a rental for the moment. It’s astoundingly unassuming looking, just (as they picture on their web site) basically a small black bar at the bottom of a 22” monitor, plus the laptop to run the programs. When I took it out of the box, it fires up the operating system and there are the icons just sitting on the desktop, with a little warning that we shouldn’t mess with any settings, install a firewall or anti-virus software for risk of messing up the primary function. They have branded the screen with a little decal from their company, but otherwise, it’s just a laptop with an attached monitor.

 

The actual getting started is a bit complicated.  I’m usually the one to pooh-pooh the need for “readme” documents, but I would have liked one here to tell me which program is which. That’s the thing – the software is powerful, but it has a bit of a steep learning curve. The “quick start” guide has several steps before you even think about calibrating a subject. We got stuck on the requirement to get Ethernet hooked up since we tried to set up in a tech closet and OSU otherwise has pretty widespread wireless coverage. Harrison had to run a 50’ cable from Mark’s office down the hallway to the closet.

 

Looks like the next step is some pretty intense work understanding how to set up an experiment in a different software program. This is where a “test” experiment just to start learning how to use the system would be good. That’s the sort of icon I need in the middle of the desktop. It reminds me of my first job as a research assistant, where I was registering brain images to a standard. The researchers had written a program to rotate the images to line up and then match certain features to the standard to stretch or compact the images as necessary, but there was no manual or quick start. My supervisor had to show me all the steps, what button did what, which order, etc. It was a fairly routine process, but it was all kept in someone’s head until I wrote it down. The pdfs here are a great start, but there still seems to be a step missing. Stay tuned!

 

Moving in the right direction

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Friday we continued our perfect technology quest, this time focusing on audio. While we actually want the cameras to capture the video in an overlapping manner, so that we can track visitors from one spot to another and be able to see their faces no matter what angle they face, it turns out that the audio is a different matter. Due to the acoustics in the Center, if we’re not careful, a mic at the front desk will pick up voices 25 feet away at the wave tank, not only muddling the audio we want to hear from the front desk, but also perhaps turning on extra cameras and recording unrelated video.

In order to localize the audio to particular people and in order to understand speech clearly, we’ll use so-called near field recording (up-close to the speaker rather than capturing a whole room). We’ll also need to input multiple mics into certain cameras in order to have audio coverage with minimal wiring in the way of exhibits. Beyond that, though, was the question of what kind of pickup pattern we need – whether the mic records audio straight in front of it, in front and behind, or all around, for example.

With help from audio technicians from the main campus who were out to work the retirement of one NOAA research vessel and the welcoming of another, we discussed the ins-and-outs of particular shapes of recording areas. Probably our best bet in most cases will be a carotid, or heart-shaped, mic, which gets mostly what’s in front of the mic, but not in a straight line, and some of what’s behind the mic. The exact sizes of the patterns can often be tuned, which in our case again will be crucial as we begin to determine how visitors use particular exhibits, where they stand when they talk to one another, and especially how they might move up and down as they interact with people of different ages and heights.

As usual, one of our biggest challenges is trying to retrofit this recording equipment into an already built space, and a space built with weird angles, less-than-optimal acoustics, somewhat unpredictable speaker locations, and often loud but inconsistent ambient noise such as the 65-decibel running water in the touch pools. But hey, that’s why we’re trying it, to see if it’s even possible and beyond possible, helpful to our research.

Worst Customer Response and Customer Service Ever: Nuance

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Wow, I thought I had seen lousy customer service, but Nuance is taking the cake. I have tried to contact the audio mining software company for the last two weeks, through their Enterprise sales web site (no response to my email), and on the phone to about 4 different phone numbers (no response to my voice messages). Tuesday the 7th I spent about 3 hours on hold waiting for their Enterprise sales departments (including multiple calls where I’d been hung up on while on hold, and voice messages on this line asking them to contact me), after trying other departments and complaining. Their other departments, however, don’t even know that the product I’m interested in exists. They did try to contact the Enterprise sales department themselves, however, but even customer service couldn’t get through! The hold “music” ironically talks about how customers go online to complain about poor customer service, and how their products can help you keyword search those web sites. And their website tag line: “As a speech company, we put a premium on listening – get in touch with Nuance today!” Uh, no you don’t.

I finally got ahold of someone in the Enterprise sales Thursday the 9th after a similar hold experience and at least 30 minutes on hold that time. Claudia told me they needed to know my budget, which I didn’t actually know. She said they wouldn’t call us back if we didn’t have at least 5-10K. I told her sure, then we’d have that if that’s what we needed. She took my name, phone number, and email, as well as Mark’s. Now, another week later, no response.

I’ve been hung up on 3 times this morning. I tried the customer service department again, and now I’m on hold while they try to contact the Enterprise sales people for me. The hold music has switched back from the stuff that customer service plays to that of the Enterprise line, so I’m suspecting customer service is not getting back to me, either. (One hour later, no response). By the way, Nuance, this does not bode well for our confidence in your technical support or customer service in general.

So, I’m putting it out to the web: if anyone has an audio mining software solution to search several camera audio feeds for keywords (basically something that competes with Nuance’s Dragon Audio Mining SDK), please contact us through this blog. Let’s talk. It’s more than your competition is willing to do.

[Specifically, we need something speaker-independent and that processes files automatically].

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.