Developing a virtual model to replicate a real-world wayfinding study

In the early 2010s, virtual reality (VR) became widely affordable and accessible for consumers and researchers due to rapid innovations in hard- and software over decades. VR ensures that experiments can be contolled well, have exact measurements, and allow for modifiable experimental manipulations. 

Despite the rapid evolution of technologies, there are still challenges involved in reproducing findings from the real world in virtual reality, using replication studies. In this book chapter, the authors aim to identify the most important challenges associated with replication studies in spatial cognition research. The authors also describe possible solutions to the challenges identified so that other researchers can overcome them. In this chapter, the authors develop a replication of a real-world wayfinding study in the Seattle Central Library in VR and focus on modelling the virtual environment, optimizing the performance, and designing the human-environment interactions.

During the development of the model, ensuring that the VR model has the exact geometries, spatial relations, sizes, boundaries and so on as the real environment (RE), is essential for a replication. The authors suggest collecting extensive reference materials to achieve correspondence between the virtual environment (VE) and RE. Also, to achieve realism and ambience, highpolygon objects and photorealistic graphics can be used with the disadvantage of longer processing time to render each frame, and, hence, a performance decrease.

To optimise the performance of the model, the authors suggest simplifying the geometry of objects with high polygon counts without compromising quality and temporarily excluding floors that will not be visible from the user’s point of view from being processed. After the optimisation process, participants are involved in the technical pre-testing of the model to identify unforeseen human-environment interactions and bugs. In this chapter, the authors also offer various considerations to counter the challenges that may arise during the pre-testing process.

The potential of VR is that it allows a 3D immersion into the perspective of a future building user. This can be useful to both architects and urban planners. The authors acknowledge that in other settings, other solutions than the ones described in this chapter might be advisable but ultimately want to to encourage other researchers, who are developing replications of real-world studies in virtual reality, to share their implementation solutions between laboratories.

The book chapter external page"Developing a replication of a wayfinding study. From a large-scale real building to a virtual reality simulation"call_made was published in Spatial Cognition XII.