There are many solutions for designing two-dimensional (2D) vision-based experiments, such as Psychophysics Toolbox (Brainard, 1997), E-Prime (Psychology Software Tools, 2016), and PsychoPy (Peirce et al., 2019). One challenge in studying naturalistic behaviors, such as navigation, in the laboratory involves the three-dimensional (3D) nature of such behaviors. We compare several alternatives to Landmarks for building navigation experiments and 3D experiments more generally, provide an overview of the package and its structure in the context of the Unity game engine, and discuss benefits relating to the ongoing and future development of Landmarks.

Landmarks is actively maintained and is supplemented by a wiki with resources for users including links, tutorials, videos, and more. Landmarks combines the ease of building drag-and-drop experiments using no code, with the flexibility of allowing users to modify existing aspects, create new content, and even contribute their work to the open-source repository via GitHub, if they so choose. Here, we present a new asset package, called Landmarks, for designing and building 3D navigation experiments in the Unity game engine. While powerful, game engines do not provide an intrinsic framework for experimental design and require at least a working proficiency with the software and any associated programming languages or integrated development environments (IDEs). One limitation to using these technologies for research applications is that they almost ubiquitously require integration with video game development platforms, also known as game engines. Devices such as head-mounted displays (HMDs) and omnidirectional treadmills provide research participants with access to a more complete range of body-based cues, which facilitate the naturalistic study of learning and memory in three-dimensional (3D) spaces. Research into the behavioral and neural correlates of spatial cognition and navigation has benefited greatly from recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology.

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