Indoor Wayfinding in Real-world Environments and Virtual Reality: A Comparison

Abstract

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.