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Equipped for Excellence: Lab Technologies, Spaces & Uses

The Digital Media + AI Innovation Lab is home to a focus group facility and controlled survey experiment environment. It is also equipped with VR goggles and state-of-the-art dial-testing technologies.

mock focus group of people sitting around a table

Focus Group

Focus groups are small panels of people who represent a target audience. A trained moderator (typically, but not always, the head researcher for the project) leads a guided discussion with the group, asking them questions about the topic of interest. One of the strengths of the focus group method is that people may feel more comfortable sharing in a group conversation instead of a one-on-one interview, and group conversation may bring up topics, ides, or themes that interviewees may struggle to recall independently. For the researcher, focus groups also cover more ground than individual interviews when the research timeline is tight. 

four perception analysis dials on a table

Dial-Testing

Dial-testing is a method that allows for the collection of data in real time. Live, recorded, moment-to-moment participant evaluations of a stimulus (e.g., a movie trailer or a magazine ad) allow for very specific feedback that does not depend on participants’ memory recall.

Essentially, participants turn a dial on a remote from 0 (left) to 100 (right) to indicate their response based on what parameters have been set by the researcher. For example, they could turn the dial to indicate agreement on a Likert scale where 1 is ‘strongly disagree’ and 5 is ‘strongly agree.’ Or, in other cases, they can turn the dial throughout the course of the stimulus exposure (e.g., watching a PSA video) and indicate when they are interested in a product, feeling a certain emotion (e.g., fear), and much more. 

student smiles while using a VR headset

Virtual Reality Headsets

Virtual reality (VR) headsets are one of the most popular technologies to emerge in the last decade. In our lab, we are equipped to do any research involving VR, including video game and eSports research, immersion studies, and a wide variety of new media applications. Our headsets are MetaQuest3 models, which are very portable and user-friendly; each headset comes with two nunchuck controllers. The goggles allow for connection to the full Meta media library, so studies can focus on user interactions with everything from interactive games to 360° documentary videos.