MazeBuilder: A virtual reality tool for use in spatial navigation research

MazeBuilder: A virtual reality tool for use in spatial navigation research

MazeBuilder: A virtual reality tool for use in spatial navigation research
Talk given at BARCCSYN 2025: Angela Marti-Marca, Sergi Ávila Sangüesa, Marcos Sánchez Torrent, Márta Szabina Pápai, Eric Estevez Jiménez, Lluis Fuentemilla, Josep Blat, Salvador Soto-Faraco, Mireia Torralba Cuello

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The use of virtual reality (VR) in neuroscience research has grown steadily alongside wider availability of affordable head-mounted displays. In addition to benefits such as hightened realism and increased immersive experience, VR can be easily paired with neuroimaging. Yet, some barriers related to programming knowledge and access to resources remain. We introduce MazeBuilder, a stand-alone open-access tool which allows researchers to easily create virtual environments and use them for spatial navigation (SN) research. In MazeBuilder the researcher can easily create, store, and present T-junction mazes with pre-designed trajectories. The environment reproduces the streets of a customizable city-like environment, that the participant navigates while driving a car. Additional background visual and/or auditory stimulation can be rendered, thus making it suitable for multisensory research. MazeBuilder also incorporates a screening workflow to reduce participant drop-out due to cybersickness. The environments can be rendered through commercially available VR gear (goggles, steering wheel, pedal) or on a computer monitor and keyboard. We demonstrate the software’s capabilities through a proof-of-concept experiment collecting both behavioral and EEG data, in which we examined time-resolved episodes of oscillatory activity related to relevant navigational variables. The results would suggest that episodes of frontal theta oscillatory activity are linked to task difficulty and access to previous encoded information, while episodes of parietal alpha oscillatory activity anticipate successful navigational decisions, possibly reflecting shifts in internal attention. MazeBuilder is therefore an effective tool for examining oscillatory activity during SN tasks, among other potential uses. The next version of MazeBuilder will incorporate a free roaming mode, in a grid-like environment, with customizable landmarks.