Sakthivel M, Patterson P E, Cruz-Neira C
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50014, USA.
Biomed Sci Instrum. 1999;35:353-9.
Navigation and wayfinding are key human factors in information processing and performance in the virtual worlds. Earlier studies have focussed on finding effective navigational aids that would support skilled wayfinding behavior of humans in large virtual worlds. Also, on a separate but related field there have been speculations that there exist biological differences between men and women's directional sense that leads to difference in performances on everyday spatial tasks in the real world. This paper focuses on findings of an experiment that was designed to elucidate the gender differences in navigating a dense, large virtual world namely the virtual Iowa State University (ISU) campus simulated in the projection based C2 virtual reality system. Equal number of subjects from both the genders with varied background (age, computer skills etc.) were assigned tasks that required them to navigate their way from one location to another within the school campus. Performance in the virtual world was studied in terms of time taken, distance traveled, number of wrong turns, number of times the subject got lost and navigation strategies/techniques used by the subjects. We conclude that there are reliable gender based differences in navigating large virtual worlds.
导航和寻路是虚拟世界中信息处理和行为表现的关键人为因素。早期研究致力于寻找有效的导航辅助工具，以支持人类在大型虚拟世界中的熟练寻路行为。此外，在一个独立但相关的领域，有人猜测男性和女性的方向感存在生物学差异，这导致了他们在现实世界中日常空间任务表现的差异。本文重点介绍了一项实验的结果，该实验旨在阐明在基于投影的C2虚拟现实系统中模拟的密集、大型虚拟世界——爱荷华州立大学（ISU）虚拟校园中导航时的性别差异。来自不同背景（年龄、计算机技能等）的男女受试者数量相等，他们被分配了在校园内从一个地点导航到另一个地点的任务。通过记录完成任务所需的时间、行进的距离、错误转弯的次数、受试者迷路的次数以及受试者使用的导航策略/技术，来研究他们在虚拟世界中的表现。我们得出结论，在大型虚拟世界中导航存在基于性别的可靠差异。
