- Title
- Investigating wayfinding using virtual environments
- Author
- Cubukcu, Ebru
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University,
City and Regional Planning, 2003.
- Advisor
- Jack L. Nasar
- Pages
- 202p.
- Abstract
- Wayfinding is the spatial knowledge about one’s current location, destination, and the spatial relation between them. Wayfinding problems threaten people’s sense of well-being, and cause loss of time and money. Designers and planners can improve wayfinding when they understand how physical environmental factors affect people’s wayfinding performance. This study explores the effect of personal and physical environmental characteristics on wayfinding performance. The personal characteristics include gender, age, and familiarity. The physical environmental characteristics include plan layout complexity, physical differentiation and its components vertical and horizontal differentiation. The experiment had eighteen (2 x 3 x 3) simulated environments, with two plan layouts (complex and simple), three kinds of vertical differentiation (no differentiation, object landmarks, and building landmarks) and three kinds of horizontal differentiation (no differentiation, road width variation, road pavement variation), and it also had four different question orders. 166 volunteers (98 male, 68 female) were tested individually. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the question orders and to one of the simulated environments with the constraint that there would be equal number of people in survey types, in plan layout conditions, in vertical differentiation conditions, and in horizontal differentiation conditions. The experiment had a learning phase and a test phase. In the learning phase, participants actively explored one of the simulated environments at their leisure up to four minutes. In the test phase the participants completed three spatial knowledge tasks (a direction estimation task, a navigation task, and a sketching task) and a survey which had questions on gender, age, frequency of playing computer game, realism of the simulated environment judgement and wayfinding strategies used in the navigation task. As expected, the Simple layouts, Higher Physical Differentiation, Vertical or Horizontal differentiation yielded better wayfinding performance than Complex layouts, Lower Physical differentiation, and No Vertical or Horizontal differentiation. Males performed better than Females, and performance improved with Familiarity.
- Keywords
- Wayfinding; Environmental Psychology; Virtual Environments; Cognition
Document number: osu1070246663.
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<http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1070246663>.
