Virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments

Empirica is a free, open-source, virtual lab platform for developing and conducting synchronous and interactive human-participant experiments. Empirica provides an API that allows experiment designers to devote their effort to implementing participant-facing views and experiment-specific logic.

  • Be Productive

    Empirica will handle all the tedious logistics: from crossing your independent variables to form treatments, randomization, synchronization, data collection, and managing players. You get straight to what is unique about your research and what interests you, whatever that may be.

  • Be Expansive & Realistic

    Study more complex tasks and set up interactions that happen over any period of time, from seconds to months, or among any number of people, from a single player to groups of any size. Don’t be constrained by the limitations of standard behavioral experiments.

  • Simple or Complex

    It is easy to implement simple A/B tests with independent players in Empirica. But it's just as easy to implement group experiments with real-time or asynchronous interactions in a factorial or within-subjects design, or designs involving multiple types of units and conditional logic.

  • Real or Artificial

    Empirica provides you with easily configurable artificial players that can be included in the experimental game. This allows for studying Human + AI social systems. This hybrid system could be the future of our society!

  • Flexible Standards

    Empirica is based on widely-used web technology standards: Javascript and React.js. This means you can create your own experimental games with only little prior programming knowledge.

  • Don’t miss the action

    Deploy your experiment from a web interface and watch the progress in real time with the ability to create one-way mirrors to observe the behavior of players in your virtual lab.

Core team and contributors

  • Abdullah Almaatouq

    Assistant Professor, MIT

  • Nicolas Paton

    Software engineer

  • Mohammed Alsobay

    PhD, MIT

  • Joshua Becker

    Assistant Professor, UCL

  • Hubertus Putu

    Programmer

  • Samuel Dupret

    Research Assistant, UCL

  • James P Houghton

    Postdoc, UPenn

  • Mark Whiting

    Postdoc, UPenn

  • Empirica Community

    Many contributors

Our Partners