For creating virtual cities, these applications have not yet been designed for experiments on human behavior, but rather for planning and simulating urban development (CityEngine, 2013; Botica et al., 2015; FUZOR, 2019; VR-Design Studio, 2019). Furthermore, it is possible to use VR in a variety of psychotherapeutic and clinical scenarios (Riva, 2005; Li et al., 2011). Not only is this cost-efficient and more interactive than classical psychotherapy (Bashiri et al., 2017), it also offers the possibility to use this treatment at home, as VR becomes more widespread in the future. This means that VR has the potential to increase access to insights of human behavior as well as to psychological interventions.
Finally VR can be combined with further technologies, such as EEG (Bischof and Boulanger, 2003) and fMRI, facilitating research of clinical disorders (Reggente et al., 2018). In summary, VR techniques have the potential to heavily advance research in the human sciences. Still, compared to classical Spain phone number list screen experiments, VR-based experiments are complex and require extensive programming, which is an intricate task by itself (Freeman et al., 2018). This causes VR experiments in behavioral research to lag behind their actual potential (Faisal, 2017). Even if already existing experiments are transferred to VR, knowledge of software and hardware must be acquired, meaning a larger expenditure of time and content.
Westdrive is developed to eliminate these obstacles in the context of studies on spatial navigation and ethical aspects. It shortens the time required for the setup of or the transfer to VR experiments by a considerable magnitude either by enabling researchers to use the project scene directly, or indirectly by letting them use only the provided assets and code. Key Features Probably the most crucial features of Westdrive are size, modularity and the simple handling of complex environments, since all components of the City AI toolkit can be used independently even without any programming knowledge. Size is often a critical factor for virtual environments. This is the case with e.g., navigation tasks within VR (König et al., 2019). A distinction is made here between room-sized vista space and large environmental space.