Exploring the Effect of Navigation Tool Design on Virtual Environment’s Navigation and Revisiting Experience

An effective navigation tool is critical for traversing a spatially ambiguous virtual environment. The navigation tool should also prompt the gain of spatial knowledge of the current environment, which supports the later revisit. Regarding the landmark-route-survey theory and path integration theory, we designed a dynamic-lines navigation tool incorporating multiple navigation lines. We examined it in a multi-floor ambiguous environment against a map-based navigation tool. Our results show that the dynamic-lines navigation tool outperformed the map navigation tool with less completion time and better user experience reported while performing the same as the map in later unassisted revisits. Besides, we found that subjects were more prone to encode goal positions with sequential landmarks even in a landmark-less environment. This finding implies that such preference might result from minimal bodily sensories when interacting with a computer-based experiment platform, suggesting that future virtual-navigation design should consider either compensating for the lack of bodily information or supporting the sequential encoding preference of spatial information.