Comparing Pedestrian Navigation Methods in Virtual Reality and Real Life

Abstract

Mobile navigation apps are among the most used mobile applications and are often used as a baseline to evaluate new mobile navigation technologies in field studies. As field studies often introduce external factors that are hard to control for, we investigate how pedestrian navigation methods can be evaluated in virtual reality (VR). We present a study comparing navigation methods in real life (RL) and VR to evaluate if VR environments are a viable alternative to RL environments when it comes to testing these. In a series of studies, participants navigated a real and a virtual environment using a paper map and a navigation app on a smartphone. We measured the differences in navigation performance, task load and spatial knowledge acquisition between RL and VR.From these we formulate guidelines for the improvement of pedestrian navigation systems in VR like improved legibility for small screen devices. We furthermore discuss appropriate low-cost and low-space VR-locomotion techniques and discuss more controllable locomotion techniques.

Use and Perceptions of Pedestrian Navigation Apps: Findings from Bologna and Porto

“…Regarding the users of PNAs, Google Maps was the preferred navigation service in both cities, which is in line with recent research [60,63]. The prevalence of Google Maps could be justified by the popularity of the mapping service, the mapping capability across multiple locations globally and by the open-access planning router that can be used for several independent or mixed transport modes [10].…”

RepliCueAuth: Validating the Use of a Lab-Based Virtual Reality Setup for Evaluating Authentication Systems

“…There is also work that compared conducting empirical studies online, in VR, in AR, in the lab, and in in-situ studies to find that some findings are comparable across the methodologies while responses to standardised questionnaires such as AttrakDif [39] and ARI [30] yielded significantly different results [104]. Others compared navigation methods in VR to the real world to find differences in e.g., navigation performance while there was no difference in users' route recognition rate across the two study types [89], or We replicated CueAuth's setup into a VR room with a situated display that shows PIN-pads (➋-a,➌-a,➍-a) featuring the cues [52]. To select a digit, the user responds to the cue displayed on its button.…”

“…We intentionally abstained from using an OptiTrack or other high-end sensors because one of the goals of VR studies is to cut down prototyping expenses. Although such technological limitations may disappear due to improved finger tracking and acquaintance of users with VR, they also suggest that VR may sometimes not be able to provide users with exactly the same experience they would face in reality (e.g., [89]).…”

“…[104] have taken the first steps towards using VR as a research method for virtual human-centred studies. A promising next step could be a combination of virtual field studies [64,89], virtual artefacts [104], and authentication as studied in our work. How can we incorporate all the benefits of field studies into humancentred evaluations while eliminating their additional costs and complexity?…”

“…While there are infrastructures that allow running online studies (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) and result in valuable and inspiring privacy and security research [7,70,84,85], they are often not suitable for USEC research involving physical prototype systems. A promising emerging evaluation paradigm is Virtual Reality (VR) studies [64,89,104]. VR studies allow researchers to conduct evaluations by having participants experience virtual replicas of real-world systems in an immersive VR environment.…”