The Virtual Navigation Toolbox: Providing tools for virtual navigation experiments

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Virtual reality (VR) is crucial for spatial navigation research, offering immersive and interactive environments.
• Existing VR tools for experiments are limited in scope, usability, and comparability.
• A need exists for flexible and manageable VR experimental development tools.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce the Virtual Navigation Toolbox (VNT) for creating spatial navigation VR experiments.
• Provide a modular and reusable set of tools for VR experiment development.
• Demonstrate the VNT's utility through a showcase study.

Main Methods:

• Developed the Virtual Navigation Toolbox (VNT) using the Unity game engine.
• Designed VNT with interchangeable and independent modules for flexibility.
• Implemented a showcase study using the VNT to test spatial navigation principles.

Main Results:

• The VNT facilitates the creation of diverse VR spatial navigation experiments.
• Homing performance in a triangle completion task was invariant to avatar translation velocity.
• Homing performance was highly sensitive to the number of landmarks present in the VR environment.

Conclusions:

• The VNT is a valuable, open-source resource for researchers in spatial navigation and VR.
• The VNT promotes easier development and data management for VR experiments.
• Findings highlight the importance of landmarks over avatar speed for spatial memory in VR navigation.