The Virtual Navigation Toolbox: Providing tools for virtual navigation experiments.

Autor: Müller MM; Department of Neurobiology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, NRW, Germany., Scherer J; Department of Neurobiology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, NRW, Germany., Unterbrink P; Department of Neurobiology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, NRW, Germany., Bertrand OJN; Department of Neurobiology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, NRW, Germany., Egelhaaf M; Department of Neurobiology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, NRW, Germany., Boeddeker N; Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, NRW, Germany.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2023 Nov 09; Vol. 18 (11), pp. e0293536. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Nov 09 (Print Publication: 2023).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293536
Abstrakt: Spatial navigation research in humans increasingly relies on experiments using virtual reality (VR) tools, which allow for the creation of highly flexible, and immersive study environments, that can react to participant interaction in real time. Despite the popularity of VR, tools simplifying the creation and data management of such experiments are rare and often restricted to a specific scope-limiting usability and comparability. To overcome those limitations, we introduce the Virtual Navigation Toolbox (VNT), a collection of interchangeable and independent tools for the development of spatial navigation VR experiments using the popular Unity game engine. The VNT's features are packaged in loosely coupled and reusable modules, facilitating convenient implementation of diverse experimental designs. Here, we depict how the VNT fulfils feature requirements of different VR environments and experiments, guiding through the implementation and execution of a showcase study using the toolbox. The presented showcase study reveals that homing performance in a classic triangle completion task is invariant to translation velocity of the participant's avatar, but highly sensitive to the number of landmarks. The VNT is freely available under a creative commons license, and we invite researchers to contribute, extending and improving tools using the provided repository.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Müller et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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