Assessing spatial and temporal reliability of the vive system as a tool for naturalistic behavioural research

Nowadays behavioral and cognitive neuroscience studies have turned 'naturalistic', aiming at understanding brain functions by maintaining complexity close to everyday life. Many scholars started using commercially available VR devices, which, were not conceived as research tools. It is therefore important to assess their spatio-temporal reliability and inform scholars about the basic resolutions they can achieve. Here we provide such an assessment for the VIVE (HTC Vive) by comparing it with a VICON (BONITA 10) system. Results show a submillimeter Vive precision (0.237mm) and a nearest centimeter accuracy (8.7mm static, 8.5mm dynamic). we also report the Vive reaction to a tracking loss: the system takes 319.5 +/- 16.8 ms to detect the loss and can still be perturbed for about 3 seconds after tracking recovery. The Vive device allows for fairly accurate and reliable spatiotemporal measurements and may be wellsuited for studies with typical human behavior, provided tracking loss is prevented.