One-way Mirror

A one-way mirror is used in some physical lab experiments to allow unobtrusive observation of participants. Using the real-time capabilities of Meteor, this is actually fairly easy to set up on an existing app.

Creating a digital one-way mirror

In the worlds and assignment section, we explained how TurkServer is designed around multiple worlds that participants can be assigned to. This example explains how to build a one way mirror or view into the experiments you are running, so that you can observe what’s happening in real time. Although this may seem like a superfluous feature, in practice you’re likely to find it incredibly useful for qualitatively understanding what’s going on—even before getting to data analysis.

The following code is built around the partitioner API that TurkServer users to divide a Meteor app into different ‘worlds’. Consider the example in the partitioner docs, describing how to use the same ChatMessages collection to effectively create a collection of separate chatrooms. To create a one-way mirror allowing you to see all chatrooms simultaneously, you could do the following.

Set up a new publication on the server

First, set up a new publication on the server, allowing direct access to the data from any particular world.

Meteor.publish("oneWayMirror", function (worldId) {
    return [
        ChatMessages.direct.find({ _groupId: worldId }),
        Meteor.users.direct.find({group: worldId}, { fields: { username: 1 } })
    ];
});

The above publication returns data about the chat messages and users, partitioned by a given world.

For those who are curious, _groupId is the world identifier in the partitioner package. The .direct syntax specifies to override the automatic partitioning or or ‘multiple worlds’ logic to directly query any particular world. The “magic” that happens with different groups in TurkServer is that the _groupId field is inserted automatically depending on a particular user’s group membership.

Meteor.users is the standard collection for Meteor’s accounts system, which is already defined. This pre-existing collection is partitioned differently from other collections that one creates (such as ChatMessages); the second argument is a field specifier so that the query returns just the username instead of other users fields such as the login token, which you would not want other users to see.

Create a view for the experimenter on the client

TurkServer uses Iron Router to control the display of templates on the client. You can use the API to add a new route for the experimenter to use the one-way mirror:

Router.map(function () {
    this.route('expAdmin', {
        path: 'exp/:groupId',
        waitOn: function () {
            return Meteor.subscribe("oneWayMirror", this.params.groupId);
        },
        data: function () {
            return { groupId: this.params.groupId }
        },
        template: 'experiment',
    });
});

For the details of the code above, take a look at the Iron Router documentation. It is a pretty well-documented client-side routing package for Meteor, and currently the most commonly used. For example, specifying a path of exp/:groupId means that browsing to exp/foo store foo to the groupId parameter of the route params. The above function then subscribes to the oneWayMirror publication with this groupId as well as passing it as an argument to the template in the data function. Check out the Iron Router guide to see more examples of how to specify routes.

The above code allows the experimenter to visit https://<server>/exp/<id> to see what’s happening with a particular group of people. The user interface that will be seen is defined by the experiment template. Usually you can just use the same interface that you have already built for participants, but for certain instances it may be useful to design a particular experimenter view (see examples below).

Hook up your mirror to the experimenter console

Since world identifiers are randomly generated by Meteor, it would be inconvenient to have to type them in yourself. Fortunately, you can specify the route for the one-way mirror in Meteor’s settings.json to view worlds automatically:

{
  "public": {
     "turkserver": { 
       "dataRoute": "expAdmin"
     }
  }
}

Under the Experiments view of the admin console, this will create a convenient button that you can click to watch ongoing or completed experiments (worlds) in real time.

Examples

Although the code for a one-way mirror is minimal, it may help to look at the following implementations for inspiration.

Crisis Mapping

This code accomplishes a pretty complex one-way mirror that allows real-time observation over a number of different collections, producing the (fast-forwarded) video above. However, the code is still minimal.

• client code
• server code

Prisoner’s Dilemma

This one-way mirror uses much simpler data, but also uses D3 to build a real-time visualization showing the experimenter much more than participants can see—including precise timing information.

• client code
• server code