Human participants were trained to navigate to two geometrically equivalent corners of a parallelogramshaped virtual environment. The unique shape of the environment combined three distinct types of geometric information that could be used in combination or in isolation to orient and locate the goals: the angular amplitudes of the corners, the relative wall length relationships, and the principal axis of symmetry. In testing, participants were placed in manipulated versions of the training environment that tested which types of geometry they had encoded and how angular information weighed in against the other two geometric properties. The test environments were (a) a rectangular environment that removed the angular information, (b) a rhombic environment that removed wall length information and drastically reduced the principal axis, and (c) a reverse-parallelogram-shaped environment that placed angular information against both wall length and principal axis information. Participants chose accurately in the rectangular and rhombus environments, despite the removal of one of the cues. In the conflict test, participants preferred corners with the correct angular amplitudes over corners that were correct according to both wall length relationships and the principal axis. These results are comparable to recent findings with pigeons and suggest that angles are a salient orientation cue for humans.

Abstract. Users today can easily and intuitively record their real-world experiences through mobile devices, and commodity virtual worlds enable users from around the world to socialize in the context of realistic environments where they simulate real-world activities. This synergy of technological advances makes the design and implementation of trans-reality games, blending the boundaries of the real and virtual worlds, a compelling software-engineering problem. In this paper, we describe fAARS, a platform for developing and deploying trans-reality games that cut across the real and parallel virtual worlds, offering users a range of game-play modalities. We place fAARS in the context of recent related work, and we demonstrate its capabilities by discussing two different games developed on it, one with three different variants.

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