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Abstract
The virtual reality (VR) system has become popular in the last two decades and is being applied increasingly to navigation studies. This study developed a panorama manifestation (PM) VR system, with six monitors forming a circular display and an interactive chair equipped with rotation sensors and operating knobs. The advantages of the PM system include a large circular display, a body-centred design, body engagement and a low set-up cost. Based on navigation experimental tasks, this system's usability was compared with that of a typical desktop (DT) system. The results showed that participants using the PM system had a significantly higher success rate and required less completion time than participants using the DT system, indicating that the PM system outperforms the DT system in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in some navigation tasks, and also suggesting that the PM system may require lower spatial cognition workload in the navigation tasks. However, the participants’ subjective evaluations of task difficulty (TD) failed to reach significance although the PM group did report a lower mean value for TD. Additionally, in the PM system, the participants’ spatial ability was more predictive to their navigation performance than that in the DT system, indicating that the PM system offered greater usability for some spatial experiments and could provide more support for participants’ navigation tasks.
Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to the reviewers and editors for their insightful and constructive comments to improve this paper.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 70771057], the Programme for New Century Excellent Talents in University, and Tsinghua University Research Funding [grant number 2009THZ01015].