Wayfinding is an important skill in the context of everyday life. Especially in unknown environments, spatial orientation in real life relies heavily on landmarks. The present study investigated the impact of outdoor and indoor landmarks in a wayfinding task performed in unknown complex office buildings in Virtual Reality. In order to investigate the performance measures of orientation, twenty-two participants had to find the conference room in the office buildings. The office buildings were constructed in the manner of mazes, incorporating dead ends and loops, and were constructed as two-story buildings. These buildings had no landmarks, indoor landmarks, outdoor landmarks or both types of landmarks. At the end, participants had to draw a digital sketch map to show the way to the conference room. The presence of landmarks led to more accurate sketch maps, in comparison to conditionswithout landmarks. While a discrepancy in accuracy was observed between the outdoor and the indoor landmark conditions in the data, this discrepancy did not attain statistical significance.

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Wayfinding and Cognitive Mapping in Virtual Reality in Complex Buildings Using Outdoor and Indoor Landmarks

  • Nils Ove Beese,
  • Jan Spilski,
  • Thomas Lachmann,
  • Jan-Hendrik Sünderkamp,
  • Jan Hendrik Plümer,
  • Alexander Jaksties,
  • Kerstin Müller

摘要

Wayfinding is an important skill in the context of everyday life. Especially in unknown environments, spatial orientation in real life relies heavily on landmarks. The present study investigated the impact of outdoor and indoor landmarks in a wayfinding task performed in unknown complex office buildings in Virtual Reality. In order to investigate the performance measures of orientation, twenty-two participants had to find the conference room in the office buildings. The office buildings were constructed in the manner of mazes, incorporating dead ends and loops, and were constructed as two-story buildings. These buildings had no landmarks, indoor landmarks, outdoor landmarks or both types of landmarks. At the end, participants had to draw a digital sketch map to show the way to the conference room. The presence of landmarks led to more accurate sketch maps, in comparison to conditionswithout landmarks. While a discrepancy in accuracy was observed between the outdoor and the indoor landmark conditions in the data, this discrepancy did not attain statistical significance.