The ability to “mark up,” or annotate, video in the same way that copy-editing programs allow the markup of textual documents could be an extraordinarily useful tool for companies conducting product research or focus groups.

And guess what? It already exists.

Calling the Muse. In 1986, EuroPARC researcher Wendy Mackay, then on staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project Athena, wrote a piece of software called EVA, an Experimental Video Annotator.

(Project Athena was a major campus computing experiment, sponsored by IBM and Digital Equipment, that set out to build a large-scale, vendor-independent, distributed workstation environment; it was the birthplace of, among other things, the X Window system, and was recently taken out of the “experimental” phase and placed under the umbrella of MIT’s Center for Educational Computing Initiatives.)

Written in Athena Muse, an authoring environment for creating time-based interactive multimedia applications (developed on campus by the Athena Visual Computing Group), EVA connects a video source — either live or prerecorded tape — to a computer and permits researchers to annotate the video in real time. It was designed from the ground up to operate on distributed networks.

Candid camera. If, for example, researchers wanted to observe someone using a new software package, they would sit at workstations while live video –from a camera displayed at the subject’s face — was displayed on the screen in one window. Another window would display the subject’s screen; an additional window would be available for text annotations typed in by the researcher at various points in the viewing process.

It is also possible to tie the subject’s computer into the system and view a keystroke log. Muse synchronizes all these functions, so a keystroke log can be viewed at the same time as the subject’s facial expression and any annotations made by the researcher.

The EVA software provides some tagging controls that are always available for use throughout the session. The only default control is a time-stamp button, pressed whenever an interesting event occurs that the researcher wants to be able to reference later. Other buttons are custom-built to tag such things as keystrokes patterns, visual images (single-frame, from the video), patterns of text transcribed from the audio track, clock times or frame numbers.

Though Mackay says she’ll be working on revamping EVA as part of her charter at EuroPARC, she’s “surprised no one’s commercialized it yet. It’s been out there for five years.” Is that an invitation?

Denise Caruso