Labsee.com is a platform for conducting online experiments. It was created by Robert Borowski and Tomek Kopczewski from the University of Warsaw. We made it for e-learning purposes and as laboratory software.
We had been hoping to find some funds to complete our project. But, unfortunately, each time, we were close to obtaining some extra funds, some unpredicted circumstances happened. So we put labsee.com at your disposal as it is, not what we dreamed of, but …. the platform is fully functional. You can conduct experiments on it for up to 500 users. The platform is robust. For nearly 6 years, we have been running online research experiments using this platform and as part of e-learning courses, and we hope it will be functional for another 12 years.
Asynchronous experiments are available for 30 days. These are the equivalents of surveys but with very unusual functionalities, such as:
- Possibility to program scenarios (for example, the result dependent on the random number generator).
- Option to limit the response time
- Programming random assignment or auto selection of subjects to experimental groups
- Obtaining and reaction times (the time the user remains on a given screen)
Synchronous experiments are usually short-lived because their course depends on the interaction between the experiment participants. The most extended tested experiment lasted about 4 hours. The length of synchronous experiments depends on the patience and coordination of users, especially online. The unique capabilities of the platform include the following:
- The ability to push an experiment when a participant becomes inactive. It can be done from the manager’s panel or by playing as non-active a given participant.
- Flexible communication options by chat: one-on-one, within experimental groups, or sending information to all. Communication can be anonymous or public.
Programming elementary experiments require no skills except HTML basics. However, interaction programming requires knowledge of JavaScript. An extensive set of shared experiments allows you to copy advanced solutions.
We will create a tutorial on how to contact specific experimental studies and we will attach codes in R to create reports based on experimental data as a Shiny applet. See the example (beta version): link to Shiny applet