Experiment building - on online experiments: Difference between revisions
(Created page with "{{Experiments}} ===On online experiments=== Online experiments, as convenient as they are, means there are many things you can no longer control for - display time, hardware response time, browser details, whether it is a computer or a phone (I have a years-old phone and I wouldn't trust its timing), headphone quality (there are some tests you can do to get a gauge of this) '''Browsers''' Assume that browsers tend to merge movement into 60Hz intervals - or what...") |
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{{Experiments}} | {{Experiments}} | ||
Online experiments, as convenient as they are, means there are many things you can no longer control for - | Online experiments, as convenient as they are, means there are many things you can no longer control for - | ||
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hardware response time, | hardware response time, | ||
browser details, | browser details, | ||
whether it is a computer or a phone (I have a years-old phone and I | whether it is a computer or a phone (I have a years-old phone and I would absolutely not trust its timing), | ||
headphone quality (there are some tests you can do to get a gauge of this) | headphone quality (there are some tests you can do to get a gauge of this) | ||
===Browser=== | |||
Assume that browsers tend to merge movement into 60Hz intervals - or whatever monitor-limited speed it's drawing at - so | Assume that browsers tend to merge movement into 60Hz intervals - or whatever monitor-limited speed it's drawing at - so | ||
negating the effects of | negating the effects of any 1000Hz keyboard / mouse / button device you may have. | ||
Also, multitasking in browsers varies | Also, behaviour and even rendering details may vary between browsers. | ||
Also, multitasking in browsers varies between browsers. | |||
Maybe there's a video stream in another tab making things... more varied. | |||
Since it's not something you can control, at all, it's not a good environment for precision timing. | Since it's not something you can control, at all, it's not a good environment for precision timing. | ||
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Easy for questionnaire style stuff, though. | Easy for questionnaire style stuff, though. | ||
===Unknown hardware=== | |||
You do not control the quality of headphones, microphones, webcams, delay in input, delay in display. | |||
Lower quality or more delay is arguably less important than ''inconsistent'' quality and ''inconsistent'' delays. | |||
All the things you can control for in a lab are almost ''fundamentally'' impossible to control elsewhere. | |||
Latest revision as of 17:39, 26 February 2024
Notes related to setting up behavioural experiments and such.
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Online experiments, as convenient as they are, means there are many things you can no longer control for - display time, hardware response time, browser details, whether it is a computer or a phone (I have a years-old phone and I would absolutely not trust its timing), headphone quality (there are some tests you can do to get a gauge of this)
Browser
Assume that browsers tend to merge movement into 60Hz intervals - or whatever monitor-limited speed it's drawing at - so negating the effects of any 1000Hz keyboard / mouse / button device you may have.
Also, behaviour and even rendering details may vary between browsers.
Also, multitasking in browsers varies between browsers. Maybe there's a video stream in another tab making things... more varied.
Since it's not something you can control, at all, it's not a good environment for precision timing.
Easy for questionnaire style stuff, though.
Unknown hardware
You do not control the quality of headphones, microphones, webcams, delay in input, delay in display.
Lower quality or more delay is arguably less important than inconsistent quality and inconsistent delays.
All the things you can control for in a lab are almost fundamentally impossible to control elsewhere.