The Underwood Project
A toolkit for research
The Underwood Project is a Unity-based toolkit designed by Guy Schofield in collaboration with the Lifelike Lab. It allows researchers to create a horror-themed environment by piecing together a maze of rooms, stairways, elevators, and corridors. Ominous content, audio, and lighting elicit a sense of threat while a key-to-door systems embed puzzles or search tasks along the way. The toolkit was specifically designed to be flexible enough for new Unity users to create experiments to study emotion, memory, and cognitive performance.
Preliminary findings: Ambiguous threat
In a series of recent experiments, we used the Underwood Project to study the sense of looming danger. Without ever presenting participants with a concrete threat, we were able to elicit physiological arousal and subjective experiences of creepiness, fear, and uncertainty.
