Database of virtual objects to be used in psychological research

Abstract

Although many visual stimulus databases exist, to our knowledge, none includes 3D virtual objects, that can directly be used in virtual reality (VR). We present 121 objects that have been developed for scientific purposes. The objects were built in Maya, and their textures were created in Substance Painter. Then, the objects were exported to an FBX and OBJ format and rendered online using the Unreal Engine 4 application. Our goal was to develop the first set of high-quality virtual objects with standardized names, familiarity, and visual complexity. The objects were normed based on the input of 83 participants. This set of stimuli was created for use in VR settings and will facilitate research using VR methodology, which is increasingly employed in psychological research.

OpenVirtualObjects (OVO): An open set of standardized and validated 3D household objects for virtual reality-based research, assessment, and therapy.

“…The database comparison showed that the familiarity ratings for OVO were comparable to or higher than for the other databases (i.e., Adlington et al, 2009;Brodeur et al, 2010;Moreno-Martínez & Montoro, 2012;Peeters, 2018;Popic et a., 2020). This emphasizes the complementarity or additional usefulness of OVO.…”

“…Comparison to other databases: For comparison and to facilitate the pooling of objects, we provide the mean ratings across objects in our database together with those of two other 3D object (Peeters, 2018;Popic et al, 2020) and three coloured-photograph databases (Adlington et al, 2009;Brodeur et al, 2010;Moreno-Martínez & Montoro, 2012). The common dimensions were the H-statistic (H), the NA (in %), Familiarity, and Details.…”

“…In this paper, we provided summary statistics and correlation coefficients of these ratings as well as naming and sematic category information. We also compared a selection of the norms with those of five existing databases that include 3D objects or colored photographs (i.e., Adlington et al, 2009;Brodeur et al, 2010;Moreno-Martínez & Montoro, 2012;Peeters, 2018;Popic et a., 2020).…”

“…OVO complements existing databases with 3D objects: For example, bigBIRD (Singh et al, 2014) contains 100 high-quality objects and is mostly targeted at computer vision researchers, but it does not contain norms relevant for experimental and clinical use. Also, Popic andcolleagues (2020(Popic et al, 2020)) provided a database of 121 objects normed for name, familiarity and visual complexity. Finally, Peeters (2018) provides a standardized set of 147 3D objects (e.g., bike, table) normed by younger adults for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity.…”

Reinstating location improves mnemonic access but not fidelity of visual mental representations

“…We validated the paradigm (continuous delayed estimation paradigm in VR) with a pilot experiment (see Appendix). As stimulus material, we will use a set of 120 validated virtual objects (see Popic, Pacozzi, & Martarelli, 2020). The objects are common in daily usage and are not rotationally symmetric (i.e., they look differently in each distinct orientation, e.g., a cup with one handle instead of a cup with two handles).…”