Historically, at least 3 methodological problems have dogged experimental social psychology: the experimental control–mundane realism trade-off, lack of replication, and unrepresentative sampling. We argue that immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can help ameliorate, if not solve, these methodological problems and, thus, holds promise as a new social psychological research tool. In this article, we first present an overview of IVET and review IVET-based research within psychology and other fields. Next, we propose a general model of social influence within immersive virtual environments and present some preliminary findings regarding its utility for social psychology. Finally, we present a new paradigm for experimental social psychology that may enable researchers to unravel the very fabric of social interaction.

Previous research reported interesting gender effects involving specific benefits for females navigating with wider fields of view on large displays. However, it was not clear what was driving the 3D navigation performance gains, and whether or not the effect was more tightly coupled to gender or to spatial abilities. The study we report in this paper replicates and extends previous work, demonstrating that the gender-specific navigation benefits come from the presence of optical flow cues, which are better afforded by wider fields of view on large displays. The study also indicates that the effect may indeed be tied to gender, as opposed to spatial abilities. Together, the findings provide a significant contribution to the HCI community, as we provide strong recommendations for the design and presentation of 3D environments, backed by empirical data. Additionally, these recommendations reliably benefit females, without an accompanying detriment to male navigation performance.

Previous results have shown that users perform better on spatial orientation tasks involving static 2D scenes when working on physically large displays as compared to small ones. This was found to be true even when the displays presented the same images at equivalent visual angles. Further investigation has suggested that large displays may provide a greater sense of presence, which biases users into adopting more efficient strategies to perform tasks. In this work, we extend those findings, demonstrating that users are more effective at performing 3D virtual navigation tasks on large displays. We also show that even though interacting with the environment affects performance, effects induced by interactivity are independent of those induced by physical display size. Together, these findings allow us to derive guidelines for the design and presentation of interactive 3D environments on physically large displays.

The literature often suggests that proprioceptive and especially vestibular cues are required for navigation and spatial orientation tasks involving rotations of the observer. To test this notion, we conducted a set of experiments in virtual reality where only visual cues were provided. Subjects had to execute turns, reproduce distances or perform triangle completion tasks: After following two prescribed segments of a triangle, subjects had to return directly to the unmarked starting point. Subjects were seated in the center of a half-cylindrical 180° projection screen and controlled the visually simulated ego-motion with mouse buttons. Most experiments were performed in a simulated 3D field of blobs providing a convincing feeling of self-motion (vection) but no landmarks, thus restricting navigation strategies to path integration based on optic flow. Other experimental conditions included salient landmarks or landmarks that were only temporarily available. Optic flow information a...

This article examines the degree to which knowledge about the body’s orientation affects transformations in spatial memory and whether memories are accessed with a preferred orientation. Participants learned large paths from a single viewpoint and were later asked to make judgments of relative directions from imagined positions on the path. Experiments 1 and 2 contribute to the emerging consensus that memories for large layouts are orientation specific, suggesting that prior findings to the contrary may not have fully accounted for latencies. Experiments 2 and 3 show that knowledge of one’s orientation can create a preferred direction in spatial memory that is different from the learned orientation. Results further suggest that spatial updating may not be as automatic as previously thought.

Two experiments examine how participants vary in their approach to solving an orientation task. Verbal reports from untrained participants in a pilot study revealed that some participants used a strategy based on mental imagery, while others used verbal descriptions to do the task. The two experiments presented here involved training participants to perform the orientation task using one of these strategies. Participants ’ performance, measured by response time and eye movements, differed as a function of strategy. An ACT-R model of the task that uses the strategies provides a validation of the proposed mechanisms, producing a close fit to both the response time and eye movement data. The model's success is achieved, in part, by performing all aspects of the task, from processing the information on the screen to making responses. Overall, the results indicate that strategic variability is an important feature of human performance on such tasks.

The authors describe 3 human spatial navigation experiments that investigate how limitations of perception, memory, uncertainty, and decision strategy affect human spatial navigation performance. To better understand the effect of these variables on human navigation performance, the authors developed an ideal-navigator model for indoor navigation whose optimizing algorithm uses a partially observable Markov decision process. The model minimizes the number of actions (translations and rotations) required to move from an unknown starting state to a specific goal state in indoor environments that have perceptual ambiguity. The authors compared the model’s performance with that of the human observer to measure human navigation efficiency. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of increasing the layout size on spatial way-finding efficiency and found that participants ’ efficiencies decreased as layout size increased. The authors investigated whether this reduction in navigation efficiency was due to visual perception (Experiment 2), memory, spatial updating strategy, or decision strategy (Experiment 3).

this paper, we examine the role of the VE's visual fidelity and the role of several cognitive characteristics of the user in enabling configurational (or "survey") knowledge of a computer-simulated large-scale maze. Configurational spatial knowledge is characterized by knowledge of the overall pattern of spatial relationships in an environment and is operationally defined here as skill at pointing and estimating distances to unseen locations from any place in an environment. It is generally assumed that increasing the fidelity of a VE will result in improvements in its training effectiveness. When VE's are used to train perceptual and motor skills, this principle is likely to be true (Hunt & Waller, 1999). For example, Witmer and his colleagues showed that a relatively high-fidelity VE (with a head-tracked stereoscopic immersive display) resulted in more accurate and faster traversal of a complex real-world route than did training with a map (Witmer, Bailey, Knerr, & Parsons, 1996). Similarly, Loomis and his colleagues showed that Spatial representations of virtual mazes p. 3 increasing the fidelity of the VE interface (by including kinesthetic and vestibular input) significantly improved the accuracy of people's memory about short paths that they had recently traversed (Chance, Gaunet, Beall, & Loomis, 1998; Klatzky, Loomis, Beall, Chance, & Golledge, 1998). It is important to realize that route memory of the type studied by Witmer et al., and by Loomis et al. is largely mediated by perceptual and motor processes and generally does not require one to form a flexible mental representation of the global characteristics of an environment (i.e., configurational knowledge). The acquisition of configurational knowledge is generally considered to be a controlled process, re...

Spatial orientation can take place in three separate scales: scenes within an individual's visual field, surrounds including information to the front, side, and rear, and neighborhoods, that contain points not visible from the current location. When asked to orient in a surround people are especially sensitive to information to their fronts and backs. However if the surround has been experienced by viewing a map time to access information about a point increases with the angle between the forward direction and the queried point. As people become familiar with neighborhoods they first notice landmarks, then paths between landmarks, and finally develop configurational knowledge of the key locations. The last stage is not always reached, even after years of experience. On the average, people can orient themselves toward an unseen point in a neighborhood with an accuracy of about twenty degrees. However there are very large individual differences in orienting ability. People can acquire or...

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR – overlaying virtual objects onto the real world) offer interesting and wide spread possibilities to study different components of human behaviour and cognitive processes. One aspect of human cognition that has been frequently studied using VR technology is spatial ability. Research ranges from training studies that investigate whether and/or how spatial ability can be improved by using these new technologies to studies that focus on specific aspects of spatial ability for which VR is an efficient investigational tool. In this paper we first review studies that used VR technologies to study different aspects of spatial ability. Then results and findings will be presented from one of the first large-scale studies (215 students) that investigated the potential of an AR application to train spatial ability. Author Keywords Virtual reality, augmented reality, spatial ability, training.