OpenMaze: An Open-Source Toolbox for Creating Virtual Environment Experiments

Incorporating 3D virtual environments into psychological experiments offers an innovative solution for balancing experimental control and ecological validity. Their flexible use, however, has been limited to those researchers with extensive coding experience because the field lacks accessible development tools. We created OpenMaze, an open-source toolbox for the Unity game engine, to overcome this barrier. OpenMaze offers researchers the ability to conduct a wide range of 3D spatial navigation experiment paradigms in fully customized 3D environments. Crucially, because all experiment configurations are defined in user-friendly JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files, our toolbox allows even those with no prior coding experience to build bespoke tasks. OpenMaze is also compatible with a variety of input devices and operating systems, broadening its possible applications. To demonstrate its advantages, we review and contrast other available software options before guiding the reader through building an experiment in OpenMaze.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Procedural Content Generation of 3D Virtual Environments

This work presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for procedural content generation (PCG) to automatically generate three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments that users can interact with. The primary objective of PCG methods is to algorithmically generate new content in order to improve user experience. Researchers have started exploring the use of machine learning (ML) methods to generate content. However, these approaches frequently implement supervised ML algorithms that require initial datasets to train their generative models. In contrast, RL algorithms do not require training data to be collected a priori since they take advantage of simulation to train their models. Considering the advantages of RL algorithms, this work presents a method that generates new 3D virtual environments by training an RL agent using a 3D simulation platform. This work extends the authors’ previous work and presents the results of a case study that supports the capability of the proposed method to generate new 3D virtual environments. The ability to automatically generate new content has the potential to maintain users’ engagement in a wide variety of applications such as virtual reality applications for education and training, and engineering conceptual design.