Development And Application Of Virtual Reality System For Experiment(Motion Perception Research)

The research on the cortical mechanism of motion perception is a very important field in neuroscience,in which the visual and vestibular signals are the two most important sensory signals involved.In the past,due to lack of research tools and?technological limitation,the stimulation representation in research experiments cannot be done easily and flexibly.Therefore,stimulation received in the natural environment cannot be simulated well.However,the development of virtual reality(VR)technology make the stimulus representation become simple and easy to control.VR technology makes it possible for subjects to be completely immersed in the virtual scene,which is helpful to expand the scope of our study and get better results.However,the technical characteristics of the VR systems on the current market limit their application in scientific research,for example,generally not providing force feedback which makes it incapable to simulate the physical motion stimuli(vestibular signals);the software interface is very limited,which cannot meet the requirement of scientific experiments for highly flexibility and high precision.The purpose of this paper is to design and develop a VR system to satisfy the experimental requirement for motion perception research.And,various functions of the VR system were also tested by performing simple psychophysical and EEG experiments.According to function requirements,our system was divided into control unit,processing unit,stimulation unit and data acquisition unit.Among them,the stimulation unit was divided into visual and vestibular stimulation modules which were responsible for the output of visual and vestibular stimulation(physical motion stimulation)repetitively.The data acquisition unit included eye tracking and EEG recording modules,which were responsible for collecting eye movements and EEG data respectively.The control unit was responsible for realizing the experimental logic.The control commands from the control unit were received and parsed in the processing unit,and then the concrete execution content was sent to corresponding modules through with communication protocols.Specific experimental logic could be implemented in a control unit with a real-time script to enable the system with the abilities of high flexibility and high precision.The recording was time-stamped according to events during experiments,which would be used to align the data in analyses.After the development of the VR system,the functions of the system were tested by simple psychophysical and EEG experiments,and improvements of the system were made based on problems found.We got some basic conclusions through preliminary experiments,which paved the way for further research.We hope the VR system could be finally used in the research on the mechanism of brain movement perception.