The Staircase Procedure Toolkit: Psychophysical Detection Threshold Experiments Made Easy

We propose a novel open-source software toolkit to support researchers in the domains of human-computer interaction (HCI) and virtual reality (VR) in conducting psychophysical experiments. Our toolkit is designed to work with the widely-used Unity engine and is implemented in C# and Python. With the toolkit, researchers can easily set up, run, and analyze experiments to find perceptual detection thresholds using the adaptive weighted up/down method, also known as the staircase procedure. Besides being straightforward to integrate in Unity projects, the toolkit automatically stores experiment results, features a live plotter that visualizes answers in real time, and offers scripts that help researchers analyze the gathered data using statistical tests.

The Staircase Procedure Toolkit: Psychophysical Detection Threshold Experiments Made Easy
André Zenner, Kristin Ullmann, Chiara Karr, Oscar Ariza (Universität Hamburg), Antonio Krüger
Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '23)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3611659.3617218
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