Comparing spatial navigation in a virtual environment vs. an identical real environment across the adult lifespan

Virtual environments (VEs) are increasingly being used as a research platform for investigating human responses to environmental variables. While VEs provide tremendous advantages in terms of variable isolation and manipulation, and ease of data-collection, some researchers have expressed concerns about the ecological validity of VE-based findings; that is, their transferability to real-world contexts. In the current study we created a virtual replica of a real-world, multi-level educational facility, and compared data collected in the VE vs. the real-world environment as participants completed identical navigational tasks. We found significant differences in all of the measures used, including distance covered, number of mistakes made, time for task completion, spatial memory, extent of backtracking, observation of directional signs, perceived uncertainty levels, perceived cognitive workload, and perceived task difficulty. We also analyzed potential age-related effects to look for heightened VE/real-world response discrepancies among older adult participants (age 55 or over) compared to younger adults (18–30 years of age). This analysis yielded no significant age-by-condition interaction effects. Finally, we examined the spatial distribution of self-reported wayfinding uncertainty across the building floorplan, finding that areas in which uncertainty was most pronounced were similar between the real-world and VE settings. Overall, these findings indicate that while virtual reality can be a useful design research tool, caution is needed when interpreting and generalizing its results.