What is PLUME?

PLUME is an open-source software toolbox (GPLv3) that allows for the exhaustive record of behavioral data (including synchronous physiological signals), their offline interactive replay and analysis, and their easy sharing due to our compact and interoperable data format.

While virtual reality research often relies on self-reported data through questionnaires and interviews, the growing need for objective measurements has made behavioral and physiological data collection essential. However, collecting this data in XR environments remains technically challenging. PLUME is a toolbox that aims to address this challenge by providing a set of tool to easily record the virtual environment, user behavior, and synchronized physiological signals as exhaustively as possible, and perform in-situ and ex-situ analysis of the data. PLUME is composed of three main tools:

• PLUME Recorder for recording data from any Unity applications.
• PLUME Viewer for replaying records and in-situ analysis.
• PLUME Python for ex-situ analysis.

We believe that PLUME can greatly benefit the scientific community by making the use of behavioral and physiological data available to as many people as possible, contributing to the reproducibility and replicability of user studies using virtual environments (XR, game design, etc), enabling the creation of large datasets, and contributing to a deeper understanding of user experience. It was presented at the IEEE VR 2024 conference both as a demo and a scientific paper (accepted in the journal track) and was published in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal.

This project was developed in the LIRIS laboratory. It was supported by the Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (PROMESS project), the French National Research Agency (RENFORCE project) and the École Centrale de Lyon/ENISE.