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.
@article{arxiv.2010.02561,
title = {Comparing Pedestrian Navigation Methods in Virtual Reality and Real Life},
author = {Gian-Luca Savino and Niklas Emanuel and Steven Kowalzik and Felix A. Kroll and Marvin C. Lange and Matthis Laudan and Rieke Leder and Zhanhua Liang and Dayana Markhabayeva and Martin Schmeißer and Nicolai Schütz and Carolin Stellmacher and Zihe Xu and Kerstin Bub and Thorsten Kluss and Jaime Maldonado and Ernst Kruijff and Johannes Schöning},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.02561},
year = {2020}
}