This question was closed Jul 16, 2014 at 12:26 AM by robertbu for the following reason:

Design/discussion question

Question by ijohnston · Jul 16, 2014 at 12:26 AM · player movement camera rotate camera movement

Creating a file that records the player position during a game in xyz coordinates

Dear all,

I'm a Professor at a University working on a research project looking at human learning, and I want to understand how people learn to navigate through environments. Unity seems to be an ideal platform to design these types of studies.

The basic design will be that a participant is inserted into the environment and are asked to find a hidden goal. They explore the environment from a first person perspective until they do.

However, I'm having problems seeing how I can get data back from this.

What I need are ways to measure the following:

The total time it takes for them to find the goal from the time of insertion.
The path distance they travel to find the goal from insertion
A description of their path in x,y,z coordinates at regular time intervals so I can determine dwell/search times in certain parts of the environment.
A description of the direction of the camera at regular time intervals so I can try to determine what aspects of the environment they are using to navigate (i.e., which landmarks they are looking at).

I suppose that #3 can be used to determine #1 and #2, so this is the most important one. #4 is a bit of a wish-list time.

Could anyone point in the direction of how to go about solving #3?

Thanks in advance, Ian

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robertbu · Jul 16, 2014 at 12:27 AM 0

Design/discussion questions like this one should be asked on Unity Forums. Unity Answers addresses single, specific technical questions. The UA format is for someone to ask a single specific question and multiple people try to answer it. Then original poster gets to pick the best answer. Unity Forums on the other hand has a discussion format.

Note that all the information you list here is easily collected. The hard part may be outputting the information for later review. That is Unity's ability to access the disk is limited or non-existant in some environments. For example, a PC build can use standard .NET I/O functions to write pretty much anywhere on the computer. But if you are trying to run your app from the web, you cannot write to the user's computer. For a web build you may end up putting the information in a database through a web interface.

Good luck on your project. It sounds interesting.