The VR Elevated Radial Maze is a customizable virtual reality (VR) environment that will measure task accuracy and biometric responses to these otherwise harmful conditions in a controlled VR environment.

Outcomes and Additional Information

• The challenge was to create an elevated radial maze environment that will serve to elicit anxiety based on people’s innate fear of heights. Users engage in tasks requiring them to traverse the maze arms.

• The project featured physical/virtual environment mapping, comprehensive data collection & logging, customizable simulation options, and maze arm objectives.

• The maze functions as a research testbed assess performance in operational scenarios. Target shooting and item retrieval objectives were added as a way to study human approach-avoidance behavior in response to non-lethal weapons and elevated environments. 

• The simulation enables researchers to vary environmental conditions and the presence of non-lethal weapons to analyze this behavior through participant performance on tasks within the maze that serve as valid analogues of real-world behavior. Task accuracy, coupled with behavioral and biometric data, can provide accurate response predictions.