Comparing Pedestrian Navigation Methods in Virtual Reality and Real Life
This work addresses the challenge of evaluating pedestrian navigation technologies in a controlled setting, offering incremental insights for researchers and developers in human-computer interaction and VR applications.
The study compared pedestrian navigation methods in virtual reality (VR) and real life (RL) to assess if VR is a viable alternative for testing, finding differences in navigation performance, task load, and spatial knowledge acquisition, leading to guidelines for improving VR systems such as enhanced legibility for small screens.
Mobile navigation apps are among the most used mobile applications and are often used as a baseline to evaluate new mobile navigation technologies in field studies. As field studies often introduce external factors that are hard to control for, we investigate how pedestrian navigation methods can be evaluated in virtual reality (VR). We present a study comparing navigation methods in real life (RL) and VR to evaluate if VR environments are a viable alternative to RL environments when it comes to testing these. In a series of studies, participants navigated a real and a virtual environment using a paper map and a navigation app on a smartphone. We measured the differences in navigation performance, task load and spatial knowledge acquisition between RL and VR. From these we formulate guidelines for the improvement of pedestrian navigation systems in VR like improved legibility for small screen devices. We furthermore discuss appropriate low-cost and low-space VR-locomotion techniques and discuss more controllable locomotion techniques.