A success story of the Georgia Research Alliance is its funding of the Learning and Performance Support Laboratory at the University of Georgia. A team led by Arthur M. Recesso, PhD has created the Video Analysis Tool (VAT), which allows you to select clips from a video stream and annotate them with comments. In thousands of tests from five years of federally funded research, the team measured VAT’s ability to improve performance of teachers or veterinarians by letting observers select clips from streamed video activities and associate comments with those clips. Through an easy interface you can watch a video of, for example, a professor in a classroom thenselect beginning and end points in the video and make comments on that section. To extract video clips easily and post critiques on the clips through a web interface is a valuable technology with potentially limitless applications. The UGA Research Foundation has applied for a patent on VAT and licensed it to Dr. Recesso’s company Evirx. Evirx has sold over 300 licenses to date, generating nominal revenue but setting the stage for the company to emerge as a commercially viable entity.
You may have heard of Dartfish, a Swiss company with US Headquarters in Atlanta who pioneered in using video for teaching sports. You’ve probably seen their SimulCam and StroMotion technologies used in Olympic broadcasts to freeze every element of motion in an athletic performance and allow a commentator to analyze those elements for the viewing audience. Although Evirx identifies Dartfish as a related type of product, the two companies are quite different in their applications. Whereas both allow users free-form selection and annotation of video clips, Dartfish has been primarily sports oriented while Evirx has focused on classroom teaching, veterinary medicine, and other forms of instruction.
The state of Georgia has conducted many telemedicine experiments. Those generally have provided for a remote video connection to allow a medical expert to assist in a case in an area where no on on site has the requisite skills.
Our initial assessment of Evirx is that is does indeed bring forward an innovative use of technology to facilitate humans teaching and assessing other humans in the performance of highly skilled activities. I’d suggest that it might help my golf swing, but even after years of playing and instruction, one would hardly associate “highly skilled” with that; I’m keeping my day job.
