NAVIGATING LARGE VIRTUAL SPACES

As important as navigation is to human performance in virtual worlds, it is an often overlooked problem in the design process. This article reports an experiment intended to show that real-world wayfinding and environmental design principles are effective in designing virtual wor lds that support skilled wayfinding behavior. The study measures parti cipant performance on a complex searching task in a number of virtual worlds with differing environmental cues. The worlds are augmented wit h either a radial grid, a map, or both a grid and a map. The control c ondition provided no additional navigational cues. The results showed that navigational performance was superior under both map treatments a s compared to the control and grid conditions. The grid was, however, shown to provide superior directional information as compared to the o ther conditions. The control condition provided the worst performance, with participants often becoming disoriented and experiencing extreme difficulty completing the tasks.