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Maintaining knowledge of current position and orientationis frequently a problem for people in virtual environments. In this paper we present a toolset of techniques based on principles of navigation derived from real world analogs, We include a discussion of human and avian navigation behaviors and show how knowledge about them were used to design our tools. We also summarize an informal study we performed to determine how our tools influenced the subjects' navigation behavior. We conclude that principles extracted from real world navigation aids such as maps can be seen to apply in virtual environments.

This paper presents empirical results to support the use of vibrotactile cues as a means of improving user performance on a spatial task. In a building-clearing exercise, directional vibrotactile cues were employed to alert subjects to areas of the building that they had not yet cleared, but were currently exposed to. Compared with performing the task without vibrotactile cues, subjects were exposed to uncleared areas a smaller percentage of time, and cleared more of the overall space, when given the added vibrotactile stimulus. The average length of each exposure was also significantly less when vibrotactile cues were present.

The study of human-computer