Software

All software listed below are capable of presenting stimuli on-screen with resolutions as low as 640×480 up to 1920×1080. That being said, best practice tends to be using the minimal resolution necessary to present your stimuli without distorting it.

Each program has a unique default, and should be changed beforehand to avoid miscalculations in experimental design. For example, E-Prime’s default resolution is 640×480; OpenSesame’s default resolution is 1024×768. While we can accommodate any of these resolutions, you must know which best fits your needs.

Another consideration is aspect ratio. Your screen on your personal computer might be 4:3 ratio (width X height), considered American standard, but the default aspect ratio of the Hyperion projector is 16:9, considered widescreen. This may seem irrelevant, but typically it is best to allow a screen to do what it knows best, so using a 4:3 experiment on a 16:9 system can lead to timing offsets or stretching, depending on how you set up the experiment. While this is not a hard and fast rule, it is worth considering and testing as the most labor-intensive aspect of any task is loading stimuli to a screen.

Currently the stimulus presentation PC (Windows-based) has multiple USB ports and a single male DB-9 RS-232 Serial Port.