Navigating large virtual spaces

Memory for targets in a multilevel simulated environment: Evidence for vertical asymmetry in spatial memory

“…Such differences are probably marginal, as compared with the great improvements on chance performance and substantial reductions in angular pointing errors that occur after virtual training. Darken and Sibert (1996) reported that where training advantages were evident, these were not gender specific. Of more direct relevance to the present study is our recent investigation of whether children (both able-bodied and disabled) also show a vertical asymmetry similar to that found in the present experiments (Wilson et al, in press).…”

“…Difficulty in making judgments on different levels in VEs may reflect the fact that a multilevel environment is another form of large-scale environment, in which disorientation has been observed in VE participants (cf. Darken & Sibert, 1996). The visual discontinuity (Kuipers, 1978;Poucet, 1993) between levels might make this kind of environment particularly difficult to remember from VE navigation alone.…”

Spatial knowledge acquisition from maps and from navigation in real and virtual environments

“…Bliss, Tidwell, and Guest (1997) found no difference between map and VE training in a similar task but did not compare performance to real-environment training, and Philbin, Ribarsky, Walker, and Hubbard (1998) found map training to be superior to VE training. Other studies have shown evidence for learning and successfully navigating solely within a VE (Darken & Sibert, 1996;Regian, Shebilske, & Monk, 1992). Ruddle, Payne, and Jones (1997) trained and tested participants in a virtual rendition of the original study environment used by Thorndyke and HayesRoth (1982).…”

M2S maps: supporting real-world navigation with mobile VR

“…It has been found that spatial cognition in virtual environments is similar to that in the real world (Ruddle et al 1997;Wilson et al 1997;Witmer et al 1996). Theories on virtual navigation (Darken and Sibert 1996;Jul and Furnas 1997;Chen and Stanney 1999) suggested that navigation in a virtual environment could be a multiple-level process, similar to a person's behavior in the real world (Loomis and Beall 1998;Timpf and Kuhn 2003). Such similarities lead to the direct applications of design principles for real-world navigation support in virtual environments.…”

“…Overview maps in virtual environments can also be automatically aligned with the direction of locomotion (Darken and Cevik 1999), giving users track-up maps, just like maps provided by GPS-based navigation tools in real life. Consideration has also been given to the improvement of the organization of spatial structures (Darken and Sibert 1996), based on a theory in architectural design: a better organized environment is easy to navigate (Lynch 1960).…”