Working on reaction times
Reaction time recording entity
VRmaze offers the ability to create reaction time based experiments. Any experiment in VRmaze can be the subject of a reaction time experiment.
Indeed, "reaction time" is not a paradigm of its own but a simple entity capable of storing user interaction.
The reaction time record entity stores the information of a keyboard or mouse key press, indiscriminately and without storing the value of the key pressed.
Reaction time recorder
Entity records mouse click and keyboard key press without any other distinguishing information.
Recording keyboard inputs
It is possible to record any keyboard key by using a keyboard interaction recorder entity.
Keyboard interactions are stored as integers.
Multiple keys pressed at the same time
The recorder is able to detect the pressing of multiple keys at the same time.
The reading of the graphic data is very complex and it is almost impossible to know which key was pressed at a specific time, due to the fact that the integer does not correspond to a known value. Indeed, the value does not correspond to the order of the letter in the alphabet (since there are other keys on a keyboard) nor, for example, to the ASCII code of the letter pressed.
To overcome this problem of reading, VRmaze offers 4 specific filters allowing to:
- Know the first timecode of a key press on the keyboard, or any button of a gamepad
- Know if a key has been pressed
- Knowing the first timecode of pressing two keys simultaneously (or any button on a gamepad)
- Knowing two given keys were pressed simultaneously
Ancillary Filters
With these 4 filters, it is possible to make some compositions, and to know, for example, if two keys were pressed not simultaneously.