Dear CogSci, apologies for the second email on automatic pupillometry (or the 3rd or 4th if you're on other listservs). We've had a lot of interest in the new method, so here are answers to most of the questions people have written in with:
- there is no limit to the number of labs that can sign up to be beta testers: any lab in any country doing any kind of human subjects research (infants, children, adults all OK) can sign up
- everyone who signs up will be given free, unlimited use of the beta version of the software as soon as it is available (hopefully within one year from now)
- all you need to have are videos of participants in an experiment (or, if you don't have them yet, plan to be collecting videos in the next few months)
- the videos do *not* need to be super high quality; it's OK for them to come from webcams in online studies, for instance, or for them to come from your lab's archives in old low-resolution formats etc
- no technical expertise is required to use the software
- no fancy equipment is required. we will be making a standalone version that runs on a reasonably fast desktop computer as an ordinary graphical application that you can download and install
- we will also (probably) be making a CLI version for cluster computing, for labs who want to extract pupillometry from many hours of video
- after the beta period is over, we will do a free release of the complete version of the software, but that may be several years from now
Most importantly at this early stage: to ensure that your letter makes it into NSF on time, please follow the instructions below to submit a letter *by 5 July*.
If you are interested in being a beta tester, please send an NSF-style Letter of Collaboration to musiclab+pupils@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. It needs to be a pdf, on your letterhead, and signed, with the following text as the body of the letter.
If the proposal submitted by Dr. Samuel Mehr entitled "Post-hoc pupillometry" is selected for funding by NSF, it is my intent to collaborate and/or commit resources as detailed in the Project Description or the Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources section of the proposal.
Thanks so much for all the inquiries and I'm happy to answer more questions off-list!
best
Sam