Remote data collection

UXF currently only supports Windows PC builds, so web browser, Android iOS, Mac OS, Oculus Quest are not supported. This is due to the way data is stored locally on the file system. However, you can still build your Unity UXF application into an EXE and distribute this, downloadable as a zip, for your participants to run remotely. To access your data, you would need to set up a server that the participants' data files can be uploaded to.

I developed 2 packages to aid in this, specifically using Amazon Web Services technology:

1. UXF S3 Uploader allows all files that are saved by UXF (behavioral data, continuous data, and logs) to be additionally uploaded to a location in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, as set up by a researcher. This utilizes the existing UXF functionality of setting up actions to be executed after a file has been written, so a developer could potentially implement uploading the files to any other storage service.

2. UXF Web Settings replaces the default UXF functionality of selecting experiment settings via a user interface, allowing settings instead to be accessed automatically from a web URL by the software itself. This allows a deployed experiment (e.g., via an app store, or simply by transferring an executable file) to be remotely altered by the researcher, without any modification to the source code. Settings files are stored in .json format and would usually be of very small file size, so they can be hosted online cheaply and easily.

A developer can implement neither, either, or both of these extras, depending on the needs of the research. For lab-based experiments, neither is required. For experiments without any need to modify settings afterward, but with the requirement of securely backing up data in the cloud, the first option can be used. If a researcher wants to remotely modify settings but has physical access to the devices to retrieve data, the second option can be used. For a fully cloud-based experiment without direct researcher contact with the participant, both optional functionalities can be used. This has been successfully tried and tested, in the context of a museum exhibition in which visitors could take part in VR experiments, with the recorded data being uploaded to the internet. Both UXF S3 Uploader and UXF Web Settings are available as open-source Unity packages.