Home - TUMFARSynchrony/SynthARium GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the SynthARium (formerly experimental-hub) wiki! 🥳

Glad that you are here! Below you will find a little more about the motivation for SynthARium and it's vision.

What is SynthARium?

A self-hosted video conferencing tool with a researcher workflow for those investigating topics of interpersonal-synchrony, socially adaptive UI's, WebAR filters, perception experiments, (and more) to conduct customizable online experiments with users.

Why did we build this?

During covid, various labs began conducting remote experiments. Different labs had different solutions like using existing tools that weren't built for the researcher workflow or developing their own tools for their unique experimental requirements. The potential opportunity to extend some of these "one off prototype" ideas for remote experiments, and aspects of the tools we were creating, cumulated into the idea for SynthARium.

When did we make it?

We started with the idea in 2022 and in little over a year, our student-led initiative has been able to get this far. Although still a work in progress or in Alpha, the main branch is always in a runnable state for you to try out. At the moment it requires a bit of technical setup know-how. You can find detailed setup instructions here or more general set up and running instructions for the frontend and backend separately. We are working on making it more accessible to everyone to use but will not be providing the experimental-hub as a service. We are interested in how your setup process went!

Who did we build this for?

Although the initial purpose was for online remote interpersonal synchrony research, our hub can potentially accommodate other HCI, computer vision, and psychology research investigations. So if you are a student or professor in a similar field, we are also building it with you in mind. Each experiment you conduct in our platform is a template that can be shared and used in experiments across disciplines. Take a look at any .JSON in backend/sessions/ where there are examples of such experimental templates that you can share with colleagues, just by sharing that file.

Where can you use it?

The tool is open-source and under the GNU General Public License v3.0 license. You can use this tool anywhere or on any computer or cloud server that is powerful enough to fulfill your experimental needs as most of the computational load from our architecture is designed to be server-side. The rationale behind this decision is to limit the requirements participants must fulfill to be able to participate in your experiment, whether they are joining on a smartphone or an augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD). We plan to continue being able to accommodate OSX, Windows, and Linux OS and so far, most testing of the hub's frontend has been conducted on Chrome browsers.

Ready to dive in and try out the SynthARium yourself? In the below links, you will find a detailed description of how to set up the platform, the intended usage of SynthARium, as well as some more detailed documentation on privacy best practices and your ethical responsibilities conducting an experiment. We also provide technical documentation if you are looking to contribute or extend the feature of the hub for your own use, some available testing tools to investigate latency and the connection test, and contribution guidelines if you would like to add your new features to our repository! You can also find out more about the talented team of students and advisors who have worked on the platform to make it possible, we wouldn't have gotten this far alone. Finally, we hope to keep the contribution open and accessible through our license outlined below.