The effects of Finger-Walking in Place (FWIP) for spatial knowledge acquisition in virtual environments

Abstract

Virtual environments (VEs) can be used to study issues related to human navigation, such as spatial knowledge acquisition. In our prior work, we introduced a new locomotion technique (LT), named "Finger-Walking-in-Place (FWIP)", for navigation tasks in immersive virtual environments (IVEs). The FWIP was designed to map human's embodied ability for real navigation to finger-based LT. A two-hand based implementation on a multi-touch device (i.e., Lemur) was evaluated. In this paper, we introduce the one-handed FWIP refined from the original design, and its implementation on a Lemur and an iPhone/iPod Touch. We present a comparative study of FWIP versus the joystick's flying LT to investigate the effect of the mapping of the human's embodied ability to the finger-based LT on spatial knowledge acquisition. This study results show that FWIP allows the subjects to replicate the route more accurately, compared to the joystick LT. There is no significant difference in survey knowledge acquisition between two LTs. However, the results are useful, especially given that the FWIP requires small physical movements, compared to walking-like physical LTs, and has positive effect on route knowledge acquisition, compared to the joystick LT. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.