New lecture capture solution to power interactive learning environments

Sony Professional Europe and lecture capture solution provider UbiCast, have announced the launch of ‘Miris Netcapture’. The new network based lecture capture solution seamlessly integrates with Vision Exchange, Sony’s flagship active learning / interactive lecture solution, to create more engaging and interactive video content for learning.

As a cornerstone of modern teaching philosophies, interactive lectures bring together students and teachers to directly interact, collaborate and brainstorm with one another while boosting engagement, information retention and the general understanding of the taught subject matter. In combination with Vision Exchange, the new Miris Netcapture offers education organisations a flexible and scalable AV solution that enables interactive lectures and lecture capture all at once, in a cost-effective manner.

“As another pioneering solution of interactive lecture technology, Sony’s Vision Exchange complements Miris Netcapture perfectly. Together, it is fantastic to offer universities, lecturers and students access to cutting-edge, interactive and dynamic content. We’re extremely excited to see how the solution we’ve jointly developed will go on to help the next generation of students.” Said Jean-Marie Cognet of UbiCast.

While Sony’s Vision Exchange allows students and teachers to wirelessly share and annotate content from their laptop, smartphone or tablet devices to the front of a classroom, Miris Netcapture records the streamed content from Vision Exchange and transfers it to UbiCast’s MediaServer video platform for editing, managing and distributing the video content through a video player dedicated to social learning. This network-based content capture solution removes the need for each room or lecture theatre to be equipped with their own recording device. Instead, Miris Netcapture will simply be permanently located in the server room and dynamically capture the required classroom.

A centralised approach to content capturing

By centralising content capturing and using Miris Netcapture, universities will be able to dramatically increase the number of classrooms that are capable of cutting-edge lecture capture for their students, unlocking greater scalability at a much lower budget than before. Meanwhile, for AV managers, centralising the capture solution reduces the need for time-intensive hardware checks throughout a building, and also reduces the risk of hardware failure. With ongoing software updates, the solution will only become more feature-rich and powerful over time.

“Recent years have seen an increasing demand from students and teachers for technology-enhanced learning environments,” explains Kenji Izu, Strategic Marketing Manager, Sony Professional. “This poses both a great opportunity for universities to differentiate themselves – and drive the quality of learning they can deliver – and a challenge in upgrading vast legacy systems. By partnering with UbiCast on the innovative new Miris Netcapture, we’re thrilled to be able to offer universities a flexible, scalable and cost-effective solution that converts traditional lecture theatres into interactive, ‘lecture capture ready’ environments.”

Capturing and Sharing Dynamic Rich Media

With the ability to capture high-definition recordings from six different video/audio sources simultaneously, Miris Netcapture also offers a highly flexible and future-proof solution. Teachers are not only able to capture a recording of the presentation they are delivering, but also video themselves delivering the lesson, as well as video student’s questions and reactions – all simultaneously. By capturing a truly holistic representation of a practical teaching environment, Miris Netcapture vastly improves the future value of the lesson-capture for students and teachers alike, compared to a traditional single-camera video capture.

Captured content is then edited and published through UbiCast’s powerful MediaServer video platform, which provides the ability to add interactivity to a recording. For example, a teacher can add a poll within the video to encourage student’s engagement or add a quiz at the end to check student’s understanding. All the characters within the slide content can also be indexed for searchability, so students can quickly get up to speed on something they missed or would like to revisit. Students are also able to add comments, ask questions and share links or files to further enrich the conversation and boost peer-group collaborating.

Dynamic Rich Media, the ability to view multiple capture feeds simultaneously, means individuals can choose which part of the capture they wish to focus on by enlarging one stream over another. Students writing a piece of coursework may want to focus on the details of a presentation, while a lecturer may study their students’ reaction and questions to better understand which areas they find difficult, and apply those learnings to future lessons.  

The new Miris Netcapture solution for higher education use will be exclusively available from Sony Europe from 28^th of February 2019.  To learn more about the solution, visit the Sony stand 1-N20 at ISE 2019 from 5^th to 8^th February 2019.