Qin, T., Dong, W., & Huang, H. (2021). Indoor Wayfinding in Real-world Environments and Virtual Reality: A Comparison. In A. Basiri, G. Gartner, & H. Huang (Eds.), LBS 2021: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Location Based Services (pp. 15–18). https://doi.org/10.34726/1745
Wayfinding has been widely studied in fields of locationbased service and geospatial cognition. It is currently unclear how wayfinding behaviour and spatial knowledge acquisition in immersive virtual reality (iVR) differ from those in real-world environments (REs). To investigate this question, we conducted the wayfinding experiment in RE with twenty-five participants and in iVR with forty participants. Participants’ eye movements, verbal reports and questionnaires were recorded. The results revealed that participants processed visual information more efficiently in RE but searched visual information more efficiently in iVR. For spatial learning, participants’ distance estimation was more accurate in iVR. This empirical study proves the ecological validity of iVR and encourages further studies to use VR techniques in wayfinding research.
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Additional information:
Published in “Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on
Location Based Services (LBS 2021)”, edited by Anahid Basiri, Georg
Gartner and Haosheng Huang, LBS 2021, 24-25 November 2021,
Glasgow, UK/online.
CC BY 4.0
