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Connecting SightLab VR Pro with BIOPAC data acquisition systems enables precise, frame-aligned synchronization between behavioral data captured in VR and physiological signals recorded in AcqKnowledge. This tech tip walks you through the essential setup steps—activating BIOPAC’s Network Data Transfer, enabling marker streaming in SightLab, and linking replay timelines—so you can reliably integrate VR events, eye-tracking metrics, and BIOPAC recordings within a unified analysis workflow.

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Initial Setup

Note: To enable data streaming from SightLab to Acqknowledge, you need to activate the NDT Network Data Transfer protocol in AcqKnowledge (NDT is a licensed feature add-on).

1. In AcqKnowledge, go to Display > Preferences > Networking.
2. Select the checkboxes for "Enable network data transfer" and "Respond to auto-recovery requests".
3. Restart the AcqKnowledge software to activate the Network Data Transfer.

This configuration only needs to be done once.

Enabling BIOPAC Integration in SightLab VR Pro

GUI Version

• You can send markers to Acqknowledge with the GUI version by using a checkbox.

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Non-GUI Version

• Set sl.SightLab(biopac=True) in the main SightLab instance.
• This will send markers to Acqknowledge when you fixate on objects, including the name of the object.

Synchronizing Session Replay Visualizations with Acqknowledge’s Graph

Starting with SightLab 2.6 and AcqKnowledge 6.02, you can fully synchronize AcqKnowledge’s playback graph with SightLab’s replay visualizations.

To use this feature:

1. Open AcqKnowledge and load the graph file recorded from the same session you are replaying in SightLab.
   
   
2. In SightLab’s Replay interface, click “Connect Biopac” to establish the connection to AcqKnowledge.
   
   
3. Click “Attach Graph” to link SightLab to the first graph displayed on the left-most tab in AcqKnowledge.
   
   

Once attached, you can control playback in either application:

• Drag the slider to scrub through the timeline.
  
  
• Use keyboard shortcuts:
  
  
  • B / N — Step backward / forward by one frame
    
    
  • C / V — Jump backward / forward in larger increments
    
    

You can also adjust what is displayed using SightLab’s replay visualization tools—sliders, toggles, and visibility controls for gaze paths, fixations, dwell spheres, and more. This allows you to seamlessly inspect physiological signals and VR behavior data together, frame-aligned.

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Viewing Events in Acqknowledge

1. Enable the events bar in Acqknowledge.
2. You can also display the "Event Palette" from the dropdown window.
3. After a session, events will appear on the timeline alongside physiological data.
4. Click on events to see their corresponding names

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Sending Custom Events to BIOPAC

You can set flags and send events to BIOPAC Acqknowledge at any time during your session:

sightlab.set_flag('something happened')

if sightlab.biopacFlag == True:

    sightlab.acqServer.insertGlobalEvent('something happened', 'stim', '')

Replace 'something happened' with your own event title.

Multi-User

For running Multi-User, select the BIOPAC Markers checkbox on the Server script. For each client, you can set biopac=True on the sightlab class if running their own Acqknowledge server. If sharing an Acqknowledge server (and connecting to the same MP device) an event will be sent to the shared Acqknowledge graph if a client joins mid-Trial and events when items are viewed or grabbed (if running their own Acqknowledge server those events will be stored on their local graph).

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Saving Physiological Data to the SightLab Data Files

To save the Acqknowledge Physiological data to the Sightlab Trial Data file, see the sample code below. Also in ExampleScripts under Biopac Saving to Data Files and Biopac Saving Average to Summary for saving averages to the summary file. This also includes a script to view a comparison chart of a condition versus the effect it has on the average physiological measurement.

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Sending SightLab data to Acqknowledge graph using LSL

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Biofeedback

See this page to see how physiological data streaming in from BIOPAC Acqknowledge can control an object in the scene. 

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Recording from an External Application

Sightlab also supports synchronization between Biopac, eye tracking data and more from external applications, such as Unity, Unreal or SteamVR. See this page for more details. 

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Other Samples

There are many more examples and functionality related to using SightLab and Biopac. To explore some of these see the Example Scripts Library

https://help.worldviz.com/sightlab/example-scripts-library 

To see how you can explore using Biopac and SightLab in your research or any questions related to setting up VR experiments and labs contact sales@worldviz.com 

To get a demo of SightLab click here