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Guiding user navigation in virtual environments using awareness of virtual off-screen space

Navigation in virtual environments can be difficult. One contributing factor is the problem of user disorientation. Two major causes of this are the lack of navigation cues in the environment and problems with navigating too close to or through virtual world objects. Previous work has developed guidelines, informed by cinematography conventions, for the construction of virtual environments to aid user comprehension of virtual "space" to reduce user disorientation. This paper describes the validation of these guidelines via a user study involving a navigation task in a virtual "maze". Results suggest that the use of the guidelines can help reduce the incidences of user disorientation. However, the guidelines seemed to have little impact on users’ abilities to construct ‘cognitive maps’ of the environment.