No abstract

Disorientation has many costs. It may lead to physical fatigue, stress, and frustration and can also jeopardize people's safety. Designing wayfinding aids to fit people's needs can facilitate their environmental knowledge acquisition and, therefore, improve their wayfinding performance. The scope of this article is human wayfinding in unfamiliar buildings, considering only individual pedestrian movement in an immersive virtual environment. The purpose is to investigate the use of external information at a higher level of awareness (e.g., signage) as a wayfinding aid, as well as the use of immersive virtual reality (VR) to study indoor wayfinding. Fifty‐four volunteers accomplished a wayfinding task (i.e., finding a room from the building's entrance) within a virtual building, employing two types of signage systems (i.e., vertical and horizontal conditions). A neutral condition (no signage) was also considered as a control condition to be used as a baseline. Aside from the success of the wayfinding task (getting to the destination), other performance metrics (distance traveled, time spent, number of pauses, and average speed) were analyzed and compared. Although the differences found are not statistically significant, findings suggest that participants assigned to the horizontal condition traveled smaller distances, spent less time, made fewer pauses, and moved at higher average speed than those assigned to vertical and neutral conditions. Gender‐related differences were found statistically significant only in the average speed variable (females were faster than males). © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This study examined the relative influence of environmental variables (corridor width and brightness) and signage (directional and exit signs), when presented in competition, on participants' route-choices in two situational variables (everyday vs. emergency), during indoor wayfinding in virtual environments. A virtual reality-based methodology was used. Thus, participants attempted to find a room (everyday situation) in a virtual hotel, followed by a fire-related emergency egress (emergency situation). Different behaviours were observed. In the everyday situation, for no-signs condition, participants choose mostly the wider and brighter corridors, suggesting a heavy reliance on the environmental affordances. Conversely, for signs condition, participants mostly complied with signage, suggesting a greater reliance on the signs rather than on the environmental cues. During emergency, without signage, reliance on environmental affordances seems to be affected by the intersection type. In the sign condition, the reliance on environmental affordances that started strong decreases along the egress route.

This article presents a workflow for virtual reality application with multiple users in face-to-face architecture classes. The problem posed is that the application of collaborative VR (with interaction through avatars) in physical classrooms is still little discussed. Thus, the work suggests that the immersive tool is integrated with the others already commonly used in the daily life of disciplines, such as photographs, videos, technical plans, among others, so that there is flexibility and ease to switch between common and immersive classes, without the need to leave the physical room. Methods include bibliographic review and preliminary experiences of authors with VR in the teaching of architecture. The results indicate a 5-step flow demonstrating how to apply VR in the college classroom.