Virtual labs allow researchers to design high-throughput and macro-level experiments that are not feasible in traditional in-person physical lab settings. Despite the increasing popularity of online research, researchers still face many technical and logistical barriers when designing and deploying virtual lab experiments. While several platforms exist to facilitate the development of virtual lab experiments, they typically present researchers with a stark trade-off between usability and functionality. We introduce Empirica: a modular virtual lab that offers a solution to the usability-functionality trade-off by employing a "flexible defaults" design strategy. This strategy enables us to maintain complete "build anything" flexibility while offering a development platform that is accessible to novice programmers. Empirica's architecture is designed to allow for parameterizable experimental designs, re-usable protocols, and rapid development. These features will increase the accessibility of virtual lab experiments, remove barriers to innovation in experiment design, and enable rapid progress in the understanding of distributed human computation.

中文翻译：

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Empirica：用于高通量宏观实验的虚拟实验室

虚拟实验室允许研究人员设计在传统的面对面物理实验室环境中不可行的高通量和宏观水平的实验。尽管在线研究越来越受欢迎，但研究人员在设计和部署虚拟实验室实验时仍面临许多技术和后勤障碍。虽然存在多种平台来促进虚拟实验室实验的开发，但它们通常会为研究人员提供可用性和功能之间的明显权衡。我们介绍 Empirica：一个模块化虚拟实验室，它通过采用“灵活的默认值”设计策略为可用性-功能权衡提供解决方案。这种策略使我们能够保持完整的“构建任何东西”的灵活性，同时提供一个可供新手程序员使用的开发平台。经验' s 架构旨在允许参数化的实验设计、可重复使用的协议和快速开发。这些功能将增加虚拟实验室实验的可访问性，消除实验设计创新的障碍，并在对分布式人类计算的理解方面取得快速进展。