Investigation into effective navigation in desktop virtual interfaces
Eyal Haik, Trevor Barker, John Sapsford, S.A. Trainis · 2002
The study reported in this paper is concerned with understanding and providing solutions to commonly reported navigation and orientation issues in virtual 3D desktop environments. An experiment was performed to investigate some of these issues. Twelve subjects performed simple tasks within a virtual desktop environment using navigational tools developed specifically for the research. Tasks were based on locating information in simple environments. Time to complete tasks, ability to remember the locations of information within the environment and user attitude were measured and recorded, along with several other important variables described in the paper. Performance on tasks and attitude to the environments was found in many cases to be related to the navigational tools used within the environments. The results demonstrated that constraining and guiding the navigation produces more effective navigation and orientation. It was found that the use of a 3D map to assist navigation was most effective in terms of time to perform tasks (p<0.01). The development of the navigational tools, the method used in the experiment and the results of the experiment are reported in this paper. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the findings of this research relate to the solution to general navigational and orientational issues in 3D virtual environments.