Researcher onboarding

These pages are not yet fully reviewed. The LUIDA team is continuing to review and improve them. If you find anything wrong on these pages, or have questions that aren't resolved by reading them, please ask or report to the LUIDA team.

Before you can build a LUIDA experiment, you need an account on the Web Console at luida.cluster.mu. The Web Console is where you register your experiment, configure consent forms and questionnaires, manage avatars, and download collected data. The Unity template you'll work in talks to this account through callExternal, so without an account there's nothing for the world to upload data to.

LUIDA is currently in closed beta. Account creation is free but gated by an approval step — typically 1–3 business days. This page walks through the full onboarding flow.

What you'll need

A Google account (the only currently-supported sign-in provider).
A few minutes to fill in the waitlist form.
A research-related reason for using LUIDA (the approval step is mostly a quick sanity check that you're a researcher, not an automated way to gate misuse).

If you already have a Google account you're comfortable using for research tooling, you have everything you need.

The onboarding flow at a glance

flowchart LR
  A[Visit luida.cluster.mu] --> B[Sign up<br/>or sign in]
  B --> C{Approved?}
  C -- No --> D[Land on /waitlist]
  D --> E[Submit email]
  E --> F[Email luida@cluster.mu]
  F --> G[Wait 1-3 business days]
  G --> H[Approval]
  H --> I[Sign in succeeds]
  C -- Yes --> I
  I --> J[/experiments/]

Approval is a one-time gate. After your email is approved, every subsequent sign-in is instant.

Step-by-step

Visit the Web Console

Open https://luida.cluster.mu in a browser. The landing page introduces LUIDA and offers two entry points: Sign In and Sign Up. Both ultimately route through the same Google OAuth flow — /signup exists for parity with conventional sign-up UX, but the underlying authentication path is identical to /signin.

Screenshot pending — the LUIDA landing page with Sign In and Sign Up buttons, captured from staging.

Click Sign In (or Sign Up at /signup — they merge at the same screen). You'll see a single button:

Sign in with Google

Click it. A standard Google OAuth consent dialog appears asking you to allow LUIDA to read your email, name, and profile picture. Approve and you'll be returned to the Web Console.

Email/password authentication is not currently active. The /signup form exists in the codebase but the credentials provider is disabled. Use Google OAuth — it's the only working path.

Land on the waitlist gate

If your email is not yet approved, the sign-in callback redirects you to /waitlist?error=not-approved. You'll see a toast that reads:

Sign-in Failed — Your email address has not been approved. Please register on the waitlist.

This is expected. Don't panic — just continue with the next step.

Screenshot pending — the /waitlist page with the email input and Register button, plus the "not approved" toast in the corner.

Register on the waitlist

The /waitlist page has a single field — your email — and a Register button. Enter the same email address tied to the Google account you just signed in with (this is what gets matched during approval) and click Register.

A success toast confirms the entry: "You have been added to the waitlist." If you've already submitted the form, you'll see "This email address is already on the waitlist." — also fine.

Email the LUIDA team

The waitlist registration alone does not trigger approval — it only creates a row in the database for an admin to review. You need to send a short email letting the team know you've registered:

To: luida@cluster.mu
Subject: Waitlist approval request — <your name>
Body: A few sentences about who you are, your affiliation, and what you intend to use LUIDA for. Researcher in a university lab, graduate student running a thesis study, industry researcher running a UX evaluation — any of these is fine.

The team manually approves entries via an admin panel, so giving them context speeds things along.

Approval typically takes 1–3 business days. If you haven't heard back after a week, send a follow-up email — occasionally messages get caught in spam.

Sign back in after approval

You'll get a confirmation email when your account is approved. After that, return to luida.cluster.mu, click Sign In, and choose Google again. This time the sign-in callback finds your WaitingList entry with approved: true and lets you through.

You'll land on /experiments — the Experiments list — which is empty for new accounts.

Screenshot pending — the empty Experiments list after first successful sign-in, with the New Experiment button highlighted.

Why the waitlist exists

LUIDA is hosted on Cluster's infrastructure with finite seats per beta cohort. The approval gate keeps the platform stable while the team works out scaling and abuse prevention. Once LUIDA exits closed beta, the waitlist will likely be replaced with self-service sign-up — but for now, expect the manual review step.

This is also the only way new accounts get the researcher role versus the admin role. Almost everyone reading this page is a researcher; admins are LUIDA team members who manage the waitlist itself.

What gets stored about your account

The Web Console records a small profile and the experiments you create. Concretely:

Field	Source	Used for
Name	Google profile	Display in the header and experiment ownership records
Email	Google profile	Sign-in identity, waitlist matching
Profile image	Google profile	Avatar in the header dropdown
Role	LUIDA-assigned (USER or ADMIN)	Permissions; almost always USER
Experiments	Created by you in the console	Your study list — owners can edit, others can't

Your questionnaire answers and custom log data are stored separately, attached to experiments rather than to user accounts (and they're tied to opaque participant identifiers, not to the researcher who collected them). For a deeper look at what flows where, see Concepts → Conditions, sessions, participants and Reference → Web Console API.

Once you're past the waitlist gate, your first stops in the Web Console are:

Create an experiment. Click + New Experiment in the header. See Creating an experiment for the full walk-through — title, consent form, world ID, allowed platforms, room capacity, and so on.
Get your eID and verify token from the experiment detail page, and paste them into Unity. See Connect to your Web Console experiment.
Build the questionnaires the experiment will display. See Concepts → Questionnaires and the (forthcoming) Web Console → Questionnaires page.
Run a test session from the Unity template (CSEmulator) and confirm the data lands in the console. See Tutorial 0 — Hello LUIDA.

Settings and account housekeeping

Once you're signed in, the Settings page (header dropdown → Settings, or /settings directly) is where you can:

View your name and email (read-only — the Web Console uses Google's profile fields verbatim).
Toggle the interface language between English and Japanese.
Delete your account (irreversible).

For the full breakdown of what each setting does, see Web Console → Settings & account.

Troubleshooting

The Google OAuth screen asks for permissions I don't recognize. LUIDA reads only email, name, and picture. If you see anything else, you may have arrived at a phishing copy of the page — verify the URL bar reads accounts.google.com.
I clicked Sign In but nothing happened / I got bounced back. Try a fresh incognito window. NextAuth occasionally chokes on stale cookies; clearing the next-auth.session-token cookie usually unsticks it.
I registered on the waitlist but never got an approval email. Check spam, then send a follow-up to luida@cluster.mu including your registered email so the team can find your row.
I want to switch the email tied to my account. There's no in-product flow for this — delete the account from Settings, sign out, and sign back in with the new Google account. You'll need a fresh waitlist approval. Experiments tied to the old account are owned by it; the team can help you transfer them if the email change is forced (e.g., an institutional address rolling over).

Where to go next

Creating an experiment — register your first study and pick up its eID for Unity.
Settings & account — language toggle, account deletion, and the rest.
Tutorial 0 — Hello LUIDA — a 30–45 minute end-to-end smoke test that ties Web Console + Unity + Cluster together.

Researcher onboarding

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