VRthreat Toolkit for Unity

Product Specification

Unity-based Virtual Reality Platform for design of behavioural experiments involving responses to threat.

Description

An immersive VR toolkit for the Unity engine that allows assessing threat-related behaviour in single, semi-interactive, and semi-realistic threat encounters. 

• The toolkit contains a suite of fully modelled naturalistic environments, interactive objects, animated threats, and C#-scripted systems. 
• These modelled environments can arranged by the user to create experiments, in the form of a series of independent “episodes” in immersive VR. 
• Several specifically designed tools aid the design of these episodes, including a system to allow for pre-sequencing the movement plans of animal threats. 
• Episodes can be built with the assets included in the toolkit, but also easily extended with custom scripts, threats, and environments if required. 
• During the experiments, the software stores behavioural, movement, and eye tracking data. 

The current version contains the following animated threats: hand-fighting human, stone-throwing human (conspecific); bear, panther, crocodile (predatory); elephant, viper, wasp (self-defending feral); bull, dog (self-defending domestic); spider, scorpion, rat (disgust-eliciting); falling rocks, collapsing bridge (inanimate); time bomb, robot (artificial). 

Sample experiments generated with the VRthreat Unity Software can be found here: https://osf.io/2b3k7/

Credits

This project uses content provided by the following individuals and companies:

Visual assets:

• Textures.com: One or more textures on the 3D models in this project have been created with photographs from Textures.com. These photographs may not be redistributed by default; please visit www.textures.com for more information
• BBC: One or several assets in this project contain sound from bbc.co.uk - copyright BBC.
• Turbosquid.com
• Daz3D.com
• Substance-share (substance3d.com):

1. URL to license agreement: https://www.substance3d.com/legal/substance-share-license-agreement/
2. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/1748 relased by Allegorithmic
3. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/1769 relased by Allegorithmic
4. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/1773 relased by Allegorithmic
5. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/2369 released by jhon117x
6. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/192 released by Loic Anquetil
7. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/3194 released by Playdoh
8. https://share-legacy.substance3d.com/libraries/4270 released by pphyciek

• Mixamo
• Zbrush (pixologic.com)

Acoustic assets:

• Zurich Emotional Voices (ZEMOV) data base created by Sascha Frühholz
• Feslyanstudios.com
• Zapsplat.com
• Iwan Gabovitch: Broken Magic Spell under CC-BY 3.0 License
• djlprojects on freesound.com: Video Game SFX Positive Action Long Tail under CC-BY 3.0 License
• bennstir on freesound.com: Door slam 2.wav under CC-BY 3.0 License

If you use this software, the license agreement requires you to credit the creators in any ensuing publication by including the following statement and citing the reference given below:

"This research used the VRthreat Toolkit for Unity created by Jack Brookes, Samson Hall, and Dominik Bach at University College London."

Reference: Brookes J, Hall S, Frühholz S, Bach DR (2023). Immersive VR for Investigating Threat Avoidance: the VRthreat Toolkit for Unity. Under review at Behavioural Research Methods.