Navigating inside and outside of the box

Article Link: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1360000/1357330/p1769-elmqvist.pdf?key1=1357330&key2=2033297321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=28074669&CFTOKEN=14175303

    Evaluating Motion Constraints for 3D Wayfinding in Immersive and Desktop Virtual Environments by Niklas Elmqvist (INRIA), M. Eduard Tudoreanu (University of Arkansas), and Philippas Tsigas (Chalmers Univ. of Tech.), did a study in which they tried using different camera systems for navigating a virtual world in both an immersive enviroment, and a desktop enviroment. They used a system called a CAVE, (Cave Automatic Virtual Enviroment) for the immersive enviroment, (a picture of a "cave" is above").

There are two main tasks in navigation, orientation and wayfinding. Orientation is finding out where you are, and wayfinding is figuring out how you are going to get to the next spot.  People accomplish this task by building cognitive maps of an area, using spatial distances and landmarks.

What follows is three techniques to make a better cognitive map.

1.   Global Coverage, the user should be exposed to all of the world they will be navigating in.

2.  Continious Motion, the users can move smoothly from place to place, and don't have to

     constantly reorient themselves.

3. Local Control: No matter how much you try to guide the user, you should ultimately let

    them control there movement as they please.

User explored a variety of different areas, consisting of indoor and outdoor enviroments,  as well as more abstract navigations (such as infoscapes).

They used three different methods for navigation, one was essentially like a tour guide, allowing users to change camera orientation. Another gave complete free reign to navigating through the enviroment. The other was kind of a hybrid between the others, the user was essentially on a leash that allowed them to wander around the area around the tour, but had to remain closeby.

At the beginning of the test the users traversed through the different enviroments. After they had accomplished this, they were given an overhead map and told to try and accurately place landmarks on an overhead map of the enviroment. In the final stage, the participants were to go back into the enviroment and to try and find objects within it.

As it turns out, while spring navigation seems to work the best for desktops, free motion worked the best for fully immersive enviroments. Guidance in CAVE's actually hurt performance.

I found this to be pretty interesting, that people are better off exploring in immersive enviroments than just being guided.

In the future they plan on studying people with long term experience with mental worlds who could form quite sophisticated mental maps of areas, such as video gamers who have played a particular game map a lot.

I thought that it was an interesting article. I myself have noticed in multiplayer computer games that some guidance through a new map is extremely helpful to being effective in the game. I would like to see further work on how training could happen using a virtual medium to provide a mental map for real world areas.