Panopto Video Platform Adds VR Support, Multi-Language Speech Recognition

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 12/18/17

Panopto has added new capabilities to its education video platform, including support for 360-degree and virtual reality video and search support for speech recognition in nine languages. The video platform includes webcasting and recording of live streaming; video management, to enable institutional customers to share videos through a secure portal; video search, to allow users to locate terms and phrases inside video; and integration with learning management systems and other software in use.

The new release lets users upload footage from 360-degree cameras and watch it using the company's updated video players or virtual reality headsets such as Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR.

The update also includes enhancements to Smart Search, the company's "inside-video" search technology. Smart Search uses automatic speech recognition, optical character recognition and human captioning (which is optional) to index every word spoken and shown within videos. This helps users search across videos to find and fast-forward to the precise moment a word is mentioned in any recording. Smart Search now supports eight languages in addition to English: Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish.

Also, the search technology integrates with captioning providers Rev.com and Verbit.ai to bolster the software's accessibility feature set. The program already works with 3Play Media, cielo24 and CaptionSync.

Native integration with Blackboard Learn has also been revamped. In the new version Blackboard customers can add Panopto video quizzes to the learning management system as assignments and look up quiz results directly from within the LMS gradebook. According to the company, these updates will help instructors test comprehension and reinforce key concepts in their recorded lectures and flipped classroom videos, and then track student progress in the gradebook. Students will also be able to see video quiz results from within Blackboard. The program also works with other major LMSes.

Among Panopto's institutional customers are the University of Michigan, the University of Central Florida and the University of California, Berkeley.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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