Virtual Reality Research Toolkit for Unreal Engine 4

Vision

The cognitive sciences (psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and others) rely on behavioral experiments to understand the nature of the mind and brain. A great many of these experiments make use of narrow, artificial stimulus-response paradigms, limiting the effectiveness of the scientific conclusions. With the advent of inexpensive, high-quality virtual reality systems, there is now an opportunity to develop experiments with ecologically valid (i.e. natural) environments and rich interactions, to better understand real cognitive processes in the wild.

We are a small group of cognitive neuroscientists building virtual reality experiments using Unreal Engine. The goal of our project is to expand the accessibility and replicability of behavioral research in VR by building an open-source toolkit as an add-on for Unreal Engine 4. We strongly believe that wider adoption of VR experimental methods in cognitive and behavioral sciences will push the frontiers of scientific knowledge forward and therefore we hope to ease the adoption of this approach by providing standardized, extensible, and simple tools to solve common challenges.

Team

Timothy Shea

Chelsea Gordon

Ramesh Balasubramaniam

David Noelle

Features

• Robust, reusable components for managing trials, blocks, and conditions.
• Easy-to-use, extensible sample experiments.
• An extended, research-friendly starter content package with simple materials, objects, and particle systems.
• Configurable event-based data logging.
• Built-in support for preprocessing and recording motion data to common formats.
• Motion-data visualization and trial-by-trial playback in VR.
• Comprehensive documentation and tutorials on how to use the toolkit for common tasks.
• An online community for toolkit support, networking, sharing content and promoting the use of VR in science.

Gallery

Timeline

We plan to spend 3 - 6 months on primary development and documentation, followed by a longer period of developing videos and tutorials, community-building, assembling starter content. A usable beta build should be ready within 6 - 12 months.

I made all of these things, so (c) Tim Shea, but please use anything you find here however you like (MIT license). This page was updated Mar. 19, 2018.