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welcome to our old site
as of march, 2005, we have moved to the all new
www.empirisoft.com
rip, our beloved, circa 1998
version, for eternity here at
old.empirisoft.com
if you ended up here via mistake or crazy link,
please let us know. in the meantime, feel free to stroll our
gardens and take in all the refreshing empirisoft days of yore
namaste
If you are already a MediaLab user and are interested in upgrading to MediaLab v2004, see What's New in MediaLab v2004. If you would like to upgrade or purchase MediaLab now, please visit our order page for details on how to get new or upgraded licenses.
If you're new to MediaLab, this page provides an overview of the program and a summary of features (old and new). If you would like more details about MediaLab, you can preview MediaLab's user-friendly manual.
MediaLab Research Software was designed as a user-friendly tool to help both technologically savvy and technologically challenged researchers with their creation of powerful computerized experiments. Designed specifically for the Windows environment, MediaLab combines smart experimental design features with the capabilities of current Pentium class PC technology.
The three highest priorities in designing MediaLab were to provide researchers with
- a highly intuitive and user-friendly environment in which to create experiments
- a high degree of flexibility with respect to experimental design
- software that would allow them to fully exploit the power of current pc technology
If you would like to see some of the initial reviews that MediaLab received, see our reviews page.
If you are interested in seeing whether MediaLab can help you with your research needs, you can download the full version and try it free for 21-days.
MediaLab allows you to specify as many experimental conditions as you like. Traditionally, general purpose programs have had limited flexibility when it comes to experimental design. With MediaLab, participants can be administered different stimuli and different dependent measures and in different orders depending on the experimental condition to which they are assigned.
MediaLab allows for a wide variety of input responses from human subjects including multiple choice responses, fill-in-the-blanks, essay-type open ended responses, thought and recall listings, and even ratings of one's own open-ended responses. MediaLab optionally assesses the reaction times for each response.
When the experiment is finished, MediaLab writes the data to an easy to analyze ASCII text file. Importantly, MediaLab writes the data file in a way that its format is constant no matter what condition the participant was in. This means one data file for all subjects in all conditions with one single set of variable definitions. MediaLab also automatically creates variable definitions so that you can instantly read the data into Excel or SPSS and analyze it immediately. Also provided is a utility to easily merge the data files collected on multiple computers.
MediaLab also allows you present a wide array of stimuli from basic and fully-formatted Word, WordPerfect, HTML, and PowerPoint Shows to multi-media files such as audio, video and image files. If MediaLab can not perform a specific task, it will branch off to run an independent program of your own creation during an experiment, and then return to where it left off.
MediaLab also comes with extensive help files, a complete 93-page manual and an on-line tutorial with sample files. However, if creating your first experiment seems a little intimidating, see our Services page for information on how we can help you out.
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For most uses, MediaLab will run perfectly well on any Pentium system (or equivalent), running Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP. At least 32 Mb of RAM is recommended. If video is going to be used frequently (e.g., MPG, AVI, MOV), then additional RAM is advisable though not necessary. Video cards with at least 2 Mb of video memory also are recommended. Unlike earlier versions, MediaLab no longer requires that you have Microsoft Access installed.
It is recommended that you also install Microsoft Office on all machines that will be running MediaLab, especially Word and PowerPoint. These programs allow MediaLab to present documents fully formatted by Word and slide shows prepared in PowerPoint. Although MediaLab will work fine without them, these programs perform cooperatively with MediaLab to produce some very impressive functionality. Also Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 4 or later is required in order for MediaLab to present HTML formatted pages (whether stored locally or on the internet). Finally, it is necessary to have a spreadsheet application (e.g., Excel, Lotus, Quattro, SPSS) installed in order to view the data files produced by MediaLab.
If you want to do traditional reaction time studies...
Although MediaLab easily allows you to assess reaction/response times with a high-resolution (i.e., < 1 ms) timer, it does so in the traditional Windows environment which is not ideal for experiments that demand extreme timing precision. For the purpose of conducting studies that require highly accurate response times to visual stimuli (e.g., priming studies), we have now released DirectRT, which provides a means to present images, text, sound and video and to assess reaction times with an exceptionally high degree of precision. The advantage of DirectRT is that it takes advantage of Microsoft's DirectX technology and so requires no special hardware in order to get very precise display times and high quality RT's (even with a standard keyboard, error is remarkably low). DirectRT can be used on its own but also works great in conjunction with MediaLab. See our DirectRT page for more details.
