Empirica
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. (2020). Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.11398.
Bibtex entry:
@article{almaatouq2020empirica, 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={arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.11398}, year={2020} }