Chat room / interactivity between users

Good afternoon Dr. Jarvis.

This recommendation may be one that the members of Empirisoft are currently exploring for future versions of MediaLab. In case it's not, I wanted to propose it as an addition to the program that I think would be of tremendous use to social scientists who wish to simulate conversations or related activities in a laboratory context.

In my own research, I am having students write about a personal experience to a participant they believe is seated in a nearby room. I had hoped to simulate an email correspondence between participants and their fictitious partners in MediaLab, but was unable to devise a reasonable (or believable) way to accomplish this. Generally speaking, I think that adding an interface to MediaLab that resembles an email or instant messaging program that would allow participants to communicate or think they are communicating with another participant, would be a tremendous addition to the program's already remarkable set of capabilities.

Thank you for your time and consideration, Dr. Jarvis. My best wishes to you.

I think we could help you to do this if you have access to a web programmer. MediaLab has some very cool features that allow you to intercept data that are posted from web pages. All you would need is a web page made with a chat type interface that sends data via form "posting". Do you have access to someone with some skill in HTML and/or Javascript? I agree it would be a super cool feature.

-Blair

Dear Blair, dear unknown stranger,

actually, that is exactly what we do using the custom items feature of ML.
In our experience, it is quite effective, i.e., participants usually believe they send an "email/instant message" to an audience. (We use the saying-is-believing paradigm in our research). We even implemented some kind of oneway chat in one of our experiments to make the interaction more "interactive" and believable, using Java Script.

In any case, what would really add some realism to this whole approach would be a full screen modus WITHOUT the black border. Blair, can you get rid of that?

Best
Rene

Hi Rene,
but if you use javascript you can make a html page which you call up from from ML which opens a popup window with the stuff you want to present, and popup-windows do in general overlay the borders of the ML-screen. Maybe you´ve already done this, but I guess this is enough to make people believe that there is a "real" chat.

best,
T.

Dear Thomas,

thanks for the hint. There are tow problems though. First, I can't program JavaScript. For some extra features we have to ask a programmer who is not part of our lab to program them. Second, that would work with one screen only, right? We use the custom item feature for our complete experiments. How would I use this popup feature in such a setting?

I imagine one could start a popup on the first screen and then program everything else within this popup windows with div tags. INstead of skipping to the next custom item one would then have only one item with different areas being visible on different times.

Blair, would that work? And would that be less complicated than to just get rid of the back border or to make it like only one pixel thick?

Thanks in advance!
Rene

Dear Rene,
ok, my approach is maybe really a bit too complicated, because if you use popups and stuff like that afaik you have to leave ML for a short time (by calling a browser via the exe-item type + url in the paramerts) and then ML will not track data any more. And I guess this is what you try to avoid.

best,
Tom

Tom,

that was exactly what I was worried about. Also, the more advanced the HTML/JacaScript programming, the less reason there is to use ML at all. After all, we got ML so we wouldn't need to program complicated stuff ourselves:)

All the best,
REne

Hi Rene,
I guess we talk about a one-in-a-million problem, and this will always be complicated to solve. And hiring a programmer for those special kinds of tasks may not relativise the benefit of ML for all other tasks which cover the nomal 95% of stuff we normally do, as soco-psychologists.

Have you ever tried to use a IM and and an (old-school) confederate, I think this would be the easiest approach.

All the best,
Thomas

I think I can help at least a little here--I've just added an option (in response to this thread) that will allow you to run a custom item full screen (i.e., no black border) by adding a (w-1) parameter. This is akin to using (w-1) to run a video at full screen. I'll post the new version (v2008.1.33) later tonight.