Unfamiliar, large-scale virtual environments are difficult to navigate. This paper presents design guidelines to ease navigation in such virtual environments. The guidelines presented here focus on the design and placement of landmarks in virtual environments. Moreover, the guidelines are based primarily on the extensive empirical literature on navigation in the real world. A rationale for this approach is provided by the similarities between navigational behavior in real and virtual environments.

This paper presents work practice data of the daily activities of software engineers. Four separate studies are presented; one looking longitudinally at an individual SE; two looking at a software engineering group; and one looking at company-wide tool usage statistics. We also discuss the advantages in considering work practices in designing tools for software engineers, and include some requirements for a tool we have developed as a result of our studies.

Four experiments addressed the question of whether prior knowledge of an object's typical movement in the real world affects the representation of motion. Representational momentum (RM) is the tendency for the short-term memory representation of an object to undergo a transformation corresponding to the object's trajectory. Using the standard RM paradigm, the RM elicited by objects with different typical motions was compared. Results indicate that conceptual knowledge about an object's typical motion affects the magnitude of RM and, as such, the representation of motion. We investigated the effects of an object's typical realworld motion on that object's representation in short-term memory. Our experiments show that representational momentum (RM) is affected by conceptual knowledge about an object's typical, real-world motion. This is inconsistent with the view that RM results exclusively from innate processes (Freyd, 1987; Freyd, 1992), and, therefore, we present a quite different explanation of RM. We also discuss how our results would be interpreted in the context of an interactive theory of mind. Freyd and Finke (1984) found that short-term visual memories, or representations, of an object are distorted along the direction of that object's implied path of motion. RM refers to this unintended mental extrapolation of the stimulus' implied trajectory. The motion and trajectory are implied because only static images of the stimulus are displayed; no real (or apparent) motion is perceived. Nonetheless, the inducing sequence of images is constructed to suggest a particular type of motion, such as rotation. For instance, one can present a series of rectangles, in which each rectangle is oriented slightly farther away from the vertical than the previous rectangle. This is similar to looking at a few time-lapse photographs of a truly rotating rectangle. This type of display induces the viewer to unintentionally extrapolate the rotation such that the mental representation of the rectangle undergoes a slight distortion corresponding to the continued rotation of the real rectangle.

The popularity of empirical methods in software engineering research is on the rise. Surveys, experiments, metrics, case studies, and field studies are examples of empirical methods used to investigate both software engineering processes and products. The increased application of empirical methods has also brought about an increase in discussions about adapting these methods to the peculiarities of software engineering. In contrast, the ethical issues raised by empirical methods have received little, if any, attention in the software engineering literature. This article is intended to introduce the ethical issues raised by empirical research to the software engineering research community, and to stimulate discussion of how best to deal with these ethical issues. Through a review of the ethical codes of several fields that commonly employ humans and artifacts as research subjects, we have identified major ethical issues relevant to empirical studies of software engineering. These issues are illustrated with real empirical studies of software engineering.

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