The Effect of Translational and Rotational Body-Based Information on Navigation - Human Walking in Virtual Environments - page 105

an intermediate accuracy of spatial knowledge, but only one study included factors of
Vis versus Rot versus Full [ 13 ]. From an ecological validity perspective, these large-
scale studies somewhat inevitably required participants to navigate routes that were
more complex, and hence ecologically more valid, than the small-scale environment
studies that were described in the previous section. It is also notable that all but one
of the large-scale studies used a high-fidelity visual scene, unlike their small-scale
counterparts. Finally, the pattern of results is independent of the spatial extent of the
environment that was used.
5.4.2.3 Whole-Environment Acquisition and Small-Scale Environments
The experiments that used awhole-environment acquisition task in a small-scale envi-
ronment have both consistencies and differences between their findings. A notable
consistency is that participants tended to maneuver around objects in a VE when pro-
vided with a physical walking interface (a Full group), but collided with them when
provided with interfaces that had less body-based information (Rot or Vis groups)
[ 10 , 11 ]. Participants' paths were also qualitatively different—curved with a walking
interface but straight for participants in Rot and Vis groups.
Zanbaka et al. [ 10 ] gathered subjective responses from participants and measured
their ability to maneuver. The other experiments quantified participants' ability to
remember where they had traveled, and showed that participants in Full groups
performed significantly better than those who were in Vis groups. However, there was
an inconsistency in the findings for participants in Rot groups. When the environment
was square those participants performed as poorly as participants who had no body-
based information (a Vis group) [ 11 ], but when the environment was circular the
Rot group's performance was comparable with that of a Full group [ 12 ]. Contrary
to assertions made by the authors of the latter study, a likely explanation is that
rotational body-based information is important when external (visual) orientation
cues are absent (see also [ 35 ]).
5.4.2.4 Whole-Environment Acquisition and Large-Scale
Environments
At first glance Table 5.2 appears to highlight several contradictions between the find-
ings of this fourth category of experiment, but the following explanations make the
underlying pattern of results more consistent. First, consider differences between
Rot and Vis groups. In none of the studies did a statistical test show a significant dif-
ference between these groups for navigational performance. For survey knowledge,
the differences between these groups appears to be metric-dependent in Experiment
1of[ 17 ] (Table 5.2 indicates that direction estimates were worst for the Rot group,
but distance estimates were worst for the Vis group), but this is due to post-hoc tests
showing that the Full group differed significantly from the Vis group (direction esti-
mates) and Rot group (distance estimates). There are indications that, with greater