What’s New in 2027

A numbered, work-through-in-order set of sample studies — each with a plain-English READ-ME, an on-screen intro, modern styles, and full-HD layouts — so you can learn DirectRT by example and adapt a working study to your own.

Show a designed web page as a stimulus — rich layouts and styling you couldn’t build from plain text or a single image. It appears as a fixed snapshot during the trial (not a live page you click around in).

Use PNG, JPEG, and GIF images directly — no converting everything to bitmaps first.

Name your trigger device once, then refer to it by that name in any study — no more tracking port numbers to mark EEG, eye-trackers, or other lab gear.

Fire a timed sequence of TTL markers at exact moments — for example, at set points during a video — so your recordings line up with what’s on screen.

The display failure that could black-screen a session on Windows 10 and 11 is gone, and triggering no longer needs a special hardware driver — so DirectRT runs on today’s locked-down lab machines.

License a machine online in seconds, with a 30-day offline grace period so a dropped connection never interrupts a session. A standard user can do it without admin rights.

Licenses with more than one seat now activate each computer on their own. If you were ever blocked setting up a second machine, just install this update and relaunch DirectRT — it activates itself, with nothing to email in.

Video plays more reliably: line up several clips, prepared between trials so playback starts clean right at onset. Prefer MP4.

Measuring spoken-response times is simpler — pick your microphone and check your levels before you run anyone.

Text in any script — including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew — now renders properly, with no workarounds. Ideal for cross-cultural research.

Sending TTL triggers to EEG and other equipment works over a standard USB connection — no parallel port and no special driver — so it runs on locked-down Windows 11.

Each response is timestamped with a high-resolution clock on its own dedicated thread, so DirectRT adds virtually no delay of its own. Your keyboard’s own USB polling still sets the floor — for the tightest millisecond precision, pair DirectRT with a button box over TTL.

Each stimulus is drawn in a single, tear-free flip locked to the monitor’s refresh, so onset timing stays clean and consistent on modern displays.

Runs at your current screen resolution and looks crisp on high-resolution and multi-monitor setups. If an older study needs a specific size, you can still set it in the style.

An optional per-session report tells you how cleanly your study actually ran — refresh rate, onset accuracy, and any dropped frames — so you can trust your numbers.

Define clickable or tappable response zones on screen and score them just like key presses.

A single, signed installer — now with a fresh, branded look (a cleaner license page and side panel matching the Empirisoft website) — sets up everything DirectRT needs, friendly for locked-down lab computers, with no special drivers to install.

A refreshed style editor and hardware tester, plus a “check my input file” dry-run that catches mistakes before you run participants, and a one-click “report a problem.”

The built-in hardware tester lets you fire and check triggers safely before a real session — if it works in the tester, it works in your study.

Setup now shows what it’s doing as it installs — the file it’s copying and a percentage — so the longer steps no longer look like they’ve frozen.

Installing over an earlier 2027 build is much quicker — setup leaves the shortcuts it’s about to reinstall in place instead of tearing them all down first. On a test upgrade that dropped from just under two minutes to under ten seconds.

If DirectRT 2020 is still on the machine, setup stops and asks you to remove it first — the two share program names and the .drt file type, so they can’t coexist. Which version to remove is your call, not ours.