Evaluating guidelines for reducing user disorientation when navigating in virtual environments

Navigation in virtual environments can be difficult. One contributing factor is user disorientation. Two major causes of this are the lack of navigation cues in the environment and problems with navigating too close to or through virtual world objects. Previous work has developed guidelines, informed by cinematography conventions, for the construction of virtual environments to aid user comprehension of virtual “space” to reduce user disorientation. To validate these guidelines two user studies have been performed where users are to complete a navigation task in a virtual “maze”. In an initial study [6] collision detection with the maze walls was not enabled and initial results found that the guidelines where effective for reducing disorientation but not for developing the user’s spatial awareness of the environment. In the study described in this paper, a second study has been performed where collision detection was enabled. Results suggest that the use of Corresponding author.