Comparing Pedestrian Navigation Methods in Virtual Reality and Real Life

TL;DR

This study compares pedestrian navigation methods in virtual reality and real life to assess VR's viability for testing navigation systems, focusing on performance, task load, and spatial knowledge.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the comparability of VR and real-world navigation, offering guidelines for VR navigation system improvements.

Findings

VR can approximate real-life navigation performance

Guidelines for improving VR navigation system legibility

Discussion of low-cost VR locomotion techniques

Abstract

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.