Abstract

People have severe problems wayfinding in large virtual worlds. However, current implementations of virtual worlds provide little support for effective wayfinding. We assert that knowledge about human wayfinding in the physical world can be applied to construct aids for wayfinding in virtual worlds. An experiment was conducted to determine whether people use physical world wayfinding strategies in large virtual worlds. The study measures subject performance on a complex searching task in a number of virtual worlds with differing environmental cues. The results show that subjects in the treatment without any additional cues were often disoriented and had extreme difficulty completing the task. In general, subjects ’ wayfinding strategies and behaviors were strongly influenced by the environmental cues in ways suggested by the underlying design principles.

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