A Dynamic and Scriptable Environment and Framework for Stimulus-Based Cognitive Research in Virtual Reality

Time perception is essential to immersive media experience, and particularly virtual reality. With the relevant technology becoming both readily available and affordable in recent years, there has been a corresponding growth in interdisciplinary research on time perception and virtual reality. This paper presents a fully customizable virtual environment and framework devised for such studies, which can furthermore be easily extended to accommodate any stimulus-based cognitive and behavioral research. The different elements of the environment can be defined in simple text-based configuration files to load and deploy new components and experimental setups quickly. Due to the generic architecture, experimenters can also control all elements externally via hardware-agnostic network messages.