Navigating Overlapping Virtual Worlds: Arriving in One Place and Finding that You're Somewhere Else

  • Authors:

  • Roy A. Ruddle

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Spatial Cognition II, Integrating Abstract Theories, Empirical Studies, Formal Methods, and Practical Applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

When a person moves through an overlapping environment they can travel in a closed, Euclidean loop but still end up in a different place to where they started. Although such environments are unusual, they do confer potential advantages for navigation. Three independent attributes of spatial overlap, as applied to 3-D virtual environments (VEs), are described, together with their likely effects on navigation. An experiment that investigated one type of overlap (loop connectivity) is described. Participants learned spatial knowledge more slowly in an overlapping VE than in a conventional VE, but the differences were small and, after initial navigation, not significant. Therefore, there seems to be no cognitive barrier to the useful implementation of overlapping VEs within a wide variety of applications.