PTVR - A software in Python to make virtual reality experiments easier to build and more reproducible.

Researchers increasingly use virtual reality (VR) to perform behavioral experiments, especially in vision science. These experiments are usually programmed directly in so-called game engines that are extremely powerful. However, this process is tricky and time-consuming as it requires solid knowledge of game engines. Consequently, the anticipated prohibitive effort discourages many researchers who want to engage in VR. This paper introduces the Perception Toolbox for Virtual Reality (PTVR) library, allowing visual perception studies in VR to be created using high-level Python script programming. A crucial consequence of using a script is that an experiment can be described by a single, easy-to-read piece of code, thus improving VR studies' transparency, reproducibility, and reusability. We built our library upon a seminal open-source library released in 2018 that we have considerably developed since then. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the PTVR software for the first time. We introduce the main objects and features of PTVR and some general concepts related to the three-dimensional (3D) world. This new library should dramatically reduce the difficulty of programming experiments in VR and elicit a whole new set of visual perception studies with high ecological validity.

Meet-U: Educating through research immersion.

We present a new educational initiative called Meet-U that aims to train students for collaborative work in computational biology and to bridge the gap between education and research. Meet-U mimics the setup of collaborative research projects and takes advantage of the most popular tools for collaborative work and of cloud computing. Students are grouped in teams of 4-5 people and have to realize a project from A to Z that answers a challenging question in biology. Meet-U promotes "coopetition," as the students collaborate within and across the teams and are also in competition with each other to develop the best final product. Meet-U fosters interactions between different actors of education and research through the organization of a meeting day, open to everyone, where the students present their work to a jury of researchers and jury members give research seminars. This very unique combination of education and research is strongly motivating for the students and provides a formidable opportunity for a scientific community to unite and increase its visibility. We report on our experience with Meet-U in two French universities with master's students in bioinformatics and modeling, with protein-protein docking as the subject of the course. Meet-U is easy to implement and can be straightforwardly transferred to other fields and/or universities. All the information and data are available at www.meet-u.org.