New & Improved Desktop App- Almost here: Bring Labvanced directly to your desktop. A revamped and user-friendly app will soon be available for researchers to download directly to their desktop for in-lab research. Local studies can directly be auto-synchronized with the latest online state, so that study creation/editing and local (offline) execution will merge with each other. Importantly, our ready-made LSL Python scripts can be used here to easily connect with external hardware such as EEG systems during local recordings. Our vision is to offer a single application that can easily be used to conduct both online and local / in-lab recordings while using the same study and code-base instead of re-implementing and running things in various environments. And this is just the start!
Smartphone App: Beta Testing: Please contact us if you are interested in testing out the smartphone app in its beta stage. Ideal for researchers who want to use this feature in the future and provide feedback. The smartphone app will be available for Android and iOS which will give researchers more opportunities and control over their experimental design and execution in mobile testing scenarios. The app will have two basic access points:
A login for researchers who can sign in and manage their studies and recordings and treat it as an admin portal (also to start recordings). This can be particularly useful for onsite and/or clinical research.
A (password-free) remote login for participants who can use a deep link to open the app with a specific Labvanced Study ID, transforming the app into a customized application for a particular study. In other words, you can create your study on Labvanced as usual, but run it as a mobile native app for data collection purposes. This of course works also in combination with crowdsourcing tools like Prolific or mTurk. The smartphone app is particularly useful for longitudinal studies, ie. studies with multiple sessions, for decentralized clinical trials or training sessions where educational intervention is a main component. Automatic push notifications remind the participants to complete the next session study in a timely manner. Note: While the smartphone/desktop app is not licensed as a medical product (yet), it can be used in scenarios where participants come into the lab, clinic, or the doctor's office to do an on-site test without relying on an internet connection. The data will be recorded locally on the device and automatically uploaded to the cloud once internet connection is restored.
In case you missed it, the Labvanced webcam-based eye tracker has been peer-reviewed! See this paper in the journal of Behavior Research Methods and consider citing it in your next publication! These are some key findings from it:
Labvanced's webcam-based eye tracking has an overall accuracy of 1.4° and a precision of 1.1° with an error of about 0.5° larger than the EyeLink system
Interestingly, both accuracy and precision improve (to 1.3° and 0.9°, respectively) when visual targets are presented in the center of the screen - something that's important for researchers to take into account given that the center of the screen is where stimuli are presented in a lot of psychology experiments.
For free viewing and smooth pursuit tasks, the correlation was around 80% between Labvanced and EyeLink gaze data. For a visual demonstration of how this correlation looks like, see the Figure 7 in the research paper which visually shows the overlap of the data points between Labvanced (blue dots) and EyeLink (red dots).
Also, the accuracy was consistent across time. Overall, these results show that webcam-based eye tracking by Labvanced is a viable option for studying the physiological signals of attention.
In Progress:
Advanced Email & System Notifications: Soon, users will receive customized advice on how to make most of the platform based on customized suggestions delivered through email and notifications.
Study Wizard: The wizard is a step-by-step interactive guide that will help new users to build a study to be configured with a spreadsheet.
ET Fixations: Our peer-reviewed ET publication demonstrates our excellence in webcam based eye-tracking, providing arguably to most accurate gaze data using this method. And while other solutions do exist, it seems that none of them even thought about proper fixation detection (probably because their data is too noisy and has too few samples). Classifying fixations is however a very important aspect of eye-tracking research, and while we already have an algorithm available, our next goal is to improve it substantially. For this, recruiting and collaboration efforts are ongoing.
Q3'23 Release Note
Our New Publication on Our Webcam-based Eye Tracking: We are happy to announce that our latest publication which compares the accuracy of our webcam eye-tracking system to an industry standard (EyeLink 1000) is finally out. While this took us quite some time and resources, it verifies our methodology in a very good journal and we are extremely happy to share this with you today! A big thank you to all the researchers who already used our eye-tracking and a big invite to everyone else to do the same! Check out the publication here in the journal of Behaviour Research Methods.
Key findings from the publication:
Labvanced's webcam-based eye tracking has an overall accuracy of 1.4° and a precision of 1.1° with an error of about 0.5° larger than the EyeLink system
Interestingly, both accuracy and precision improve (to 1.3° and 0.9°, respectively) when visual targets are presented in the center of the screen - something that's important for researchers to take into account given that the center of the screen is where stimuli are presented in a lot of psychology experiments.
For free viewing and smooth pursuit tasks, the correlation was around 80% between Labvanced and EyeLink gaze data. For a visual demonstration of how this correlation looks like, see the Figure 7 from the publication which shows the overlap between the data points between Labvanced (blue dots) and EyeLink (red dots).
Also, the accuracy was consistent across time.
Awarded European Network of AI Excellence (ELISE) Funding: As AI researchers that have brought you accurate webcam-based eye tracking, being awarded with the European Network of AI Excellence grant (ELISE) helps us make the next step in providing you with more opportunities for online research through the development of PageGazer. While using the same underlying technology, PageGazer will be a new platform that focuses on performing UI/UX, marketing, and general website research. PageGazer will have the capabilities to include our innovative eye-tracking technology into any website, and augment this with smart website parsing to derive new research insights. The Elise funding will help us to achieve this goal faster and more efficiently as well as verifies again the excellence and innovation of our approach. If you want to know more or be part of an EXCLUSIVE and free BETA TEST phase for PageGazer please contact us, we are currently looking for first users who are excited to try out something new!
New Features:
Canvas (Free Drawing) Element: The canvas (free drawing) element is now available as a shape object that you can use in your experiment to draw freely with shapes, strokes, or text. This allows you or participants to input free form responses in an experiment.
Media Elements on Questionnaires: Now, it is possible to insert media elements, such as videos, directly into questionnaires (ie. page frames). This allows you more control over your experimental creation process by being able to place different types of visuals directly into the survey.
Resting API Integration: Now available, the Resting API allows you to download data programmatically. You just create an API token in the application to authenticate via API client which allows you to access the data immediately via the server. Researchers have already begun using this new capability as it allows them to streamline their process even more by being able to access data locally. The Resting API is great for organizations and academic research institutions who want to centralize their data fetching and store their data in dedicated places as per their pipeline protocol. Instead of selecting and downloading data manually and saving it locally, this allows you to access the data via your servers which is important for GDPR protocol.
Improvements:
Server-side improvements: While not directly visible to you in your day-to-day experimental creation and process, our latest server-side improvements have a big impact for online studies because they ensure improved performance and reliability. A few examples of the improvements we made include: increased server capacity, more automated updates, an automatic failover if one server fails, and better monitoring services for assessing the healthiness of the servers.
New payment flow: The new payment flow is here! For new license oncomers, payment is now required prior to activating the license. A few other related improvements include: improved UI, a secure public payment link which allows another individual to pay for your license (important for purchasing departments), reopening an order, and automatic detection of payments via bank transfer through reference code recognition.
In Progress:
Smartphone app: With a mobile up, clinical trial and longitudinal studies can make more use out of Labvanced through features like push notifications to remind participation and not relying on the internet for certain tasks.
Desktop app: With LSL integration and online/offline (ie local) modes combined in a desktop app, you can connect Labvanced to local devices like EEG with LSL integration.
Email nurturing and notifications: Soon, users will receive customized advice on how to make most of the platform based on customized suggestions delivered through email and notifications.
New Study Wizard: To ensure accelerated study implementation, a study wizard will be available for new users that experience a learning curve when first joining Labvanced in order to get their study to where it needs to be!
Q2'23 Release Note
Research Grant Program: A new and exciting opportunity for all researchers out there, this grant program is perfect for those who want to boost their careers and credibility with a small grant that will support their research in Labvanced. Benefits include financial support for attending a conference, as well as recruiting study participants.
Free Drawing Element: Due to popular requests, you can now draw directly in the editor thanks to the newly added Canvas Drawing element. This new feature allows the experiment creator and participant to draw freely but also insert shapes like circles and triangles. This feature can be relevant for many experimental use cases like free association. Automatic Subject Reassignment: Stronger randomization and balancing This request, which was placed by many researchers who wanted stronger balancing methods, is here! Now, automatic subject reassignment is possible in Labvanced. What does this mean? Consider if, let's say, subject 17 drops out of the experiment, the system can now automatically assign a subject to fill this subject number. Why is this important? Because in many experiments the subject number plays a role in the type of stimuli that the participant sees. In the past, the system didn't take into consideration dropouts on a stimuli level but rather on the group level. As a result of this feature, randomization has become more powerful. Another example of this feature at work comes during manual discarding. If the researcher manually discards a participant, for whatever reason, the next participant that is newly enrolled in the study can automatically fill the spot of the discarded participant. This ensures that the experiment is completed and that the researchers receive all the data they need.
Switch toggle for eye tracking to make it kid-friendly: In the study settings for eye tracking, there is a newly implemented switch toggle that can enable kid-friendly eye-tracking. This switch toggles and will turn this setting on and off. Before this update, it was just a checkbox and once it was turned on, it was not possible to switch off.
Safari is now by default disabled as a browser: Safari is an odd browser that doesn't always act as expected, especially when it comes to innovative browser-based technologies such as Labvanced. We have disabled Safari as an option for running experiments (yes, it can be turned back on and be made available). The reason for this decision was because more advanced features like eye tracking and audio autoplay were not working so well on this browser, thus Safari is not recommended for experiments using such advanced features.
Joined Audio/Video and Object triggers into a single trigger: The editor UI has been updated so that the trigger for Audio/Video is the same as the Object trigger. Based on the type of trigger, a different drop down menu with specific options will appear. This helps make the experiment creation process more streamlined and reduces the need of performing multiple steps over and over again. Please note that existing studies using the now retired Audio/Video trigger are not affected.
Joined Audio/Video and Control Object actions into a single action: Similar to the point above which is about triggers, the same has been done for the corresponding actions for Audio/Video and Control Object. Please note that existing studies using the now retired Audio/Video trigger are not affected.
Easier sharing for group license holders: If you have a group license, it is now easier to share studies with people who have the same classroom license or redemption code. This works for 6 months after the code has been activated, even if they have a different license or have only a free account.
In Progress
New Resting API: This is a standard API that is generated and will work with a code, allowing you to login and download all of your data programmatically. The Resting API will be great for organizations and academic research institutions who want to centralize their data fetching and store their data in dedicated places as per their pipeline protocol. Instead of selecting and downloading data manually and saving it locally, this allows organizations to access the data on their servers which is important for GDPR protocol.
Onboarding: We are still working on the onboarding process where new users can learn in an interactive manner as soon as they create a new account.