Labvanced vs Pupil Player

Labvanced is a no-code platform for designing and running behavioral research experiments. Researchers use graphical tools to build studies and can collect millisecond-precise reaction-time measures and webcam-based eye tracking. Study elements include questionnaires, audio and video stimuli, mouse tracking, and real-time multi-participant sessions. Labvanced documents recruitment integrations including Prolific, CloudResearch, Sona Systems, Besample, Panelabs, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Clickworker. Its desktop app can connect EEG systems, eye trackers, motion sensors, and wearables through Lab Streaming Layer, and can run locally without internet access; that app is available to group and departmental license holders for Windows, MacOS, and Linux Ubuntu. A Chrome extension enables controlled studies on live third-party websites while recording gaze, clicks, hovering, and scrolling. Labvanced says webcam eye-tracking video is not sent to its servers or experimenters by default. The free plan includes 300 MB of storage, 10 recordings, and one active recruiting link. Paid tiers list live chat, with some adding premium email support or onboarding. Labvanced was released in 2018 and is maintained by Scicovery GmbH.

Pupil Player is free, open-source software for viewing, analyzing, and exporting Pupil Capture recordings. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and uses hardware recordings as input. Playback includes frame stepping, timeline trimming, and five speeds from 0.25x through 4x. A plugin framework adds gaze displays, marker and surface tracking, and data export. Analysis plugins cover post-hoc fixation and blink detection, pupil detection, gaze calibration, mapping, validation, and head-pose tracking. Visualizations can show circles, crosses, polylines, light points, heatmaps, or fixation overlays. Raw Data Exporter writes pupil and gaze data as CSV, while World Video Exporter saves visualized video. An iMotions exporter creates undistorted world video and gaze.tlv data. Exports go into an exports subfolder without removing or overwriting raw captures. Available plugins depend on the recording source, and eye-video overlays require eye video enabled during capture. Runtime-loaded Python plugins can extend the software.