Using Morris Water Maze in restricted space.

We visited Sachin Tiwari, and Keiko Mizuno at Professor Karl Peter Giese's lab in the Denmark Hill campus of Kings College London (home of the famous Institute of Psychiatry Europe's largest center for research and post-graduate education in psychiatry, psychology) recently. They've been users of HVS Image systems now for over 20 years and are just setting up their HVS Image 2013 system for Morris Water Maze video tracking. They have a very well set-up, compact laboratory that has been producing excellent Morris Water Maze data for generations of scientists, but one feature that we helped them overcome recently is the relatively low ceiling height that means that the camera height is 1.7 meters above the pool. To get the whole pool in view we've suggested

1. Microsoft VX-6000 LifeCam. This camera not only has excellent low light capabilities but has a very wide angle lens giving a 71 degree coverage.

2. LifeCam Cinema which has a 73,5-degree wide angle glass lens.

3. If you need a really wide angle (albeit at the expense of some distortion) you can simply add an adaptor like a Zeikos ZE-WA37S 37mm 0.45X Wide Angle Lens

to a LifeCam Cinema camera. You can do this very simply by wrapping electrical tape around the barrel of the LifeCam until it is wide enough to retain the Zeikos Macro lens. The autofocus will correct for any focal length adjustment automatically and distortions are modest in tracking terms. Here is one that was made elsewhere but does just the job (Thanks Scott!)!