Journal article

vexptoolbox: A software toolbox for human behavior studies using the Vizard virtual reality platform


Authors listSchuetz, Immo; Karimpur, Harun; Fiehler, Katja

Publication year2023

Pages570-582

JournalBehavior Research Methods

Volume number55

Issue number2

ISSN1554-351X

eISSN1554-3528

Open access statusHybrid

DOI Linkhttps://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01831-6

PublisherSpringer


Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful tool for researchers due to its potential to study dynamic human behavior in highly naturalistic environments while retaining full control over the presented stimuli. Due to advancements in consumer hardware, VR devices are now very affordable and have also started to include technologies such as eye tracking, further extending potential research applications. Rendering engines such as Unity, Unreal, or Vizard now enable researchers to easily create complex VR environments. However, implementing the experimental design can still pose a challenge, and these packages do not provide out-of-the-box support for trial-based behavioral experiments. Here, we present a Python toolbox, designed to facilitate common tasks when developing experiments using the Vizard VR platform. It includes functionality for common tasks like creating, randomizing, and presenting trial-based experimental designs or saving results to standardized file formats. Moreover, the toolbox greatly simplifies continuous recording of eye and body movements using any hardware supported in Vizard. We further implement and describe a simple goal-directed reaching task in VR and show sample data recorded from five volunteers. The toolbox, example code, and data are all available on GitHub under an open-source license. We hope that our toolbox can simplify VR experiment development, reduce code duplication, and aid reproducibility and open-science efforts.



Citation Styles

Harvard Citation styleSchuetz, I., Karimpur, H. and Fiehler, K. (2023) vexptoolbox: A software toolbox for human behavior studies using the Vizard virtual reality platform, Behavior Research Methods, 55(2), pp. 570-582. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01831-6

APA Citation styleSchuetz, I., Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2023). vexptoolbox: A software toolbox for human behavior studies using the Vizard virtual reality platform. Behavior Research Methods. 55(2), 570-582. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01831-6



Keywords


Behavioral studyExperiment developmentVIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTSVizard programming

Last updated on 2025-10-06 at 11:37