Empirica

https://empirica.ly/

Open source project to tackle the problem of long development cycles required to produce software to conduct multi-participant and real-time human experiments online.

We are in Beta

This is a REAL beta - this means that you will be using a version of Empirica that is not yet ready for public release and still lacks proper documentation and examples. You should be prepared to find things which don't work perfectly, so please give us feedback on how to make them better. You can provide us with feedback by sending an email to hello@empirica.ly or by creating an issue on GitHub. The more feedback you give us, the better!

Create Empirica App

The easy way to create an Empirica app.

Quick Start

You’ll need to have Node.js >= 8 on your local development machine. See Usage bellow if you don't have it installed.

npx create-empirica-app my-experiment
cd my-experiment
meteor

Then open http://localhost:3000/ to see your experiment.

Usage

create-empirica-app requires Node.js >= 8. If you don't already have Node.js 8+ setup, we recommend you use the official installer: https://nodejs.org/en/download/.

Then you can simply run the following command, where my-experiment is the name of the experiment you wish to create:

npx create-empirica-app my-experiment

It will create a directory called my-experiment inside the current folder.
Inside that directory, it will generate the initial project structure and install the transitive dependencies:

my-experiment
├── .meteor
├── README.md
├── node_modules
├── package.json
├── package-lock.json
├── .gitignore
├── public
├── client
│   ├── main.html
│   ├── main.js
│   ├── main.css
│   ├── game
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── intro
│   │   └── ...
│   └── exit
│       └── ...
└── server
    ├── main.js
    ├── callbacks.js
    └── bots.js

No configuration or complicated folder structures, just the files you need to build your app. Once the installation is done, you can open your project folder:

cd my-experiment

Inside the newly created project, you can run the standard meteor command to start you app locally:

meteor

meteor runs the app in development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will automatically reload if you make changes to the code.
You will see the build errors in the console.

Updating Empirica Core

As new versions of Empirica become available, you might want to update the version you are using in your app. To do so, simply run:

meteor update empirica:core

Development

To run an Empirica app against a development version of empirica:core, you will need to use the METEOR_PACKAGE_DIRS environment variable. From an Empirica app, simply point to your copy of empirica:core as so (in this example, your meteor-empirica-core dir would be a child of /usr/local/my_packages/, .i.e /usr/local/my_packages/meteor-empirica-core):

METEOR_PACKAGE_DIRS="/usr/local/my_packages/" meteor

For more information on how to contribute please take a look at our contribution guide.

Citing Empirica

If you use Empirica in a scientific publication, we would appreciate citing the following:

Almaatouq, A., Becker, J., Houghton, J. P., Paton, N., Watts, D. J., & Whiting, M. E. (2021). Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments. Behavior Research Methods, 1-14.

Bibtex entry:

@article{almaatouq2021empirica,
  title={Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments},
  author={Almaatouq, Abdullah and Becker, Joshua and Houghton, James P and Paton, Nicolas and Watts, Duncan J and Whiting, Mark E},
  journal={Behavior Research Methods},
  pages={1--14},
  year={2021},
  publisher={Springer}
}