A STUDY OF SPATIAL ORIENTATION IN A VIRTUAL WEIGHTLESS ENVIRONMENT : Part1 Relationship between spatial orientation and the configulation of connected modules

Abstract

In a virtual weightless environment, pointing and modeling tasks were conducted to examine subjects'orientational skills. Subjects who wore a head-mounted display in a reclining chair moved from one end to the other end in several routes that were made by three or four modules that were connected by cubical modules, and pointed to the start point and made the experienced route by a scale model. Analyses of the results show the ability of spatial orientation varies with such variables as the number of bends, the number of embedding planes and the number of planes with respect to the body posture. Subjects who miss the tasks have a tendency not to take the change of the direction of their body axes into account.