I7 core

In Experiments 1 and 2, stimuli were displayed using the Oculus Rift Developmental Kit 2 (DK2). The DK2 has a field of view that extends approximately 95°(horizontally) x 106° (vertically). The screen has a resolution of 920 x 1080 pixels and a 75hz refresh rate.
In Experiment 3, stimuli were presented in an Oculus Rift CV1 virtual headset. The CV1 has a field of view that extends approximately ±110° diagonally. The screen has a 1,080 x 1,200-pixel resolution per eye and a 90Hz refresh rate. For all three experiments the stimuli were created in Unity (Version 5.5.2f1, Unity Technologies SF, US) on an Alienware Area-51 R2 computer with an intel i7 core and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 graphics card. The projection was in stereo and was actively linked to the position of the participant’s head. Therefore, distance cues were available from stereo and parallax.

For both tasks we used an Oculus Rift DK2 (Oculus, Menlo Park, CA, USA) head-mounted display (HMD), with a nominal static field of view of up to 100°. We extracted head gaze information from the head tracking sensor from the HMD to update the environment (allowing the exploration of the virtual space) and to compute parameters related to space exploration. We used headphones for higher immersion into the virtual environments, and to deliver the sounds in the dual task. The 3D environments were generated using the game engine Unity (Unity Technologies, San Francisco, USA). Raw data were stored in CSV files. We generated statistics from the CSV files to spreadsheets using Python 2.7 scripts. The tasks ran on a PC with Windows 8.1, Intel i-7 core, 8 GB of RAM and a Nvidia Geforce GTX 980. In addition, for the near space task we used MindMaze’s proprietary motion tracking system, based on a stereo camera and markers for detection of upper body movements in the 3D space. The application included a simple graphical user interface that allowed the experimenter to enter subject data (ID number, gender, age, handedness), and to select and launch the level to be performed.