The Unity Experiment Toolbox (UNEXT) – Facilitating the design of cognitive and spatial studies

The Unity Experiment Toolbox (UNEXT) aims to support the design of cognitive and spatial experiments in the Unity game engine. It provides key features required for experiment design such as looping one or multiple scenes as experimental trials, stimulus randomization, stimulus and response data export, and the recording of demographic variables. The toolbox supports a great variety of stimulus types such as 2D images and videos, 3D scenes, 360° images and videos, VR environments, text or audio. Furthermore, it allows to present stimuli either on monitors, VR head mounted displays (HMDs) or even a combination of both. Demo scenes provide examples on how different stimulus types, distractor tasks or questionnaires can be implemented. Taken together, UNEXT provides tools that can greatly accelerate and simplify the creation of experiments in Unity. Consequentially, the benefits provided by Unity such as displaying dynamic and interactive stimuli in 2D and 3D with realistic physics and lighting models can be better utilized for cognitive and spatial research. This paper describes the most relevant features of UNEXT and how it can be implemented into a Unity project.