Rethinking the Mini-Map: A Navigational Aid to Support Spatial Learning in Urban Game Environments

ABSTRACT

Players in computer games continue to rely on assistance for navigation in the game environment, even after hours of gameplay. This behavior is in contrast to the real world where spatial knowledge of an unfamiliar environment develops with experience and reliance on navigational assistance declines. The slow development of spatial knowledge in virtual environments can be attributed to the use of turn-by-turn navigational aids. In the context of computer games, the most common form of these aids is a “mini-map.” The use of such aids in computer games is necessitated by the demands of immersion and entertainment and, hence, they cannot be entirely discarded. The need, then, is to design navigational aids that support, rather than inhibit, the development of spatial knowledge. The authors propose landmark-based verbal directions as an alternative to mini-maps and report the results of a randomized comparative study conducted to examine the impact of mini-maps and their proposed aid on the development of spatial knowledge in a virtual urban environment. The results confirm the superiority of their verbal aid in terms of spatial knowledge, while mini-maps perform better with respect to navigational efficiency. The authors hope that this study provides a first step toward defining design parameters that govern the tradeoff between navigational efficiency and spatial learning.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Khubaib Ali Pirzada for assisting with compiling the results and Dr. Muddassar Malik, who kindly consented to conducting the experiment on the machines at his lab.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Numair Khan

Numair Khan is a doctoral student in the computer science department at Brown University. Before joining Brown, Numair worked as a research associate at the National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. His research focuses on the use of novel interfaces to enhance presence and facilitate learning in virtual environments.

Anis Ur Rahman

Anis Ur Rahman received his master’s degree in Parallel and Distributed Systems from the Joseph Fourier University, France, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2013 from Grenoble University, France. He is now an Assistant Professor at School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. His main research interests comprise modeling of visual attention by assessing the different mechanisms guiding it, salient multi-object image and video segmentation and tracking, and efficient implementations of large-scale scientific problems on commodity graphical processing units.