Web-Enabled Subjective Test (WEST)

The Web-Enabled Subjective Test (WEST) software package offers a solution to the problem of gathering subjective testing data from multiple locations and multiple portable or computing devices. The software is freely available for download.

Modern web browsers and most smartphones and tablets support HTML 5 and its related technologies, including the <video>` tag. This fact, along with programmable web server logic, enables the collection of audio, video, or multimedia subjective test data in unique new ways.

Originally written to conduct an over-the-top device comparison study, the software has been generalized for more commonly occurring test scenarios. WEST uses server-client infrastructure which allows one to conduct experiments measuring the delivered quality to any number of different mobile devices or computers whether on a local network or distributed throughout the world. Stimuli encoded using H.264 can be decoded using most modern web browsers; most smartphones and tablets contain hardware H.264 codecs. WEST differs from Tally, another subjective testing software package, in that stimuli are actually played back on the device connecting to the server.