Actionable Guidance Outperforms Map and Compass Cues in Demanding Immersive VR Wayfinding

Abstract

Navigation aids are central to immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences that involve physical locomotion. Their effectiveness depends not only on how much spatial information they provide, but also on how directly that information supports movement decisions. We compared three common guidance techniques for immersive VR wayfinding: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass. In a controlled room-scale VR study with 42 participants completing 1008 trials, participants navigated to target landmarks in a time-pressured maze with reduced visibility and forced route replanning. Across behavioral and eye-tracking measures, arrow guidance produced the strongest navigation performance, minimap guidance yielded intermediate performance, and compass cues performed worst, suggesting that during immersive locomotion users benefit from guidance that can be interpreted rapidly while moving. These results suggest that in demanding immersive locomotion tasks, interfaces that translate spatial information directly into actionable movement cues can outperform richer but more interpretive spatial representations. Our findings highlight the importance of designing XR navigation interfaces that minimize the cognitive translation between spatial information and movement decisions.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Representative first-person views during navigation trials. (A) Unaided navigation. (B) Arrow guidance providing an egocentric directional cue toward the goal (which may point through walls when the target is occluded). (C) Minimap showing a north-up overview of the maze with participant and target locations. (D) Compass indicating the goal bearing relative to the participant's current heading. Images show the right-eye view captured from the SteamVR compositor during navigation trials.
• Figure 2: Top-down schematic of the VR maze. Landmarks (paintings) are denoted by orange nodes; walls are shown as black tiles. (A) The green path represents the guided learning route. (B) The blue path represents an example path during a navigation trial, while yellow triangles represent path directionality.
• Figure 3: Incidental objects used for the secondary selective attention task. Twelve visually salient everyday objects were placed along potential paths in the maze during navigation trials. These objects were not relevant to the navigation task but served as incidental stimuli to measure participants’ attention to the surrounding environment. After each trial, participants reported which objects they noticed while navigating.
• Figure 4: Primary navigation performance across aids. (A) Composite navigation performance score (Nav_Comp), combining completion time and excess distance (higher values indicate better performance). Arrow outperformed both Minimap and Compass. (B) Trial completion time (s). Arrow yielded faster completion time than Minimap and Compass. Times are shown on the original scale for interpretability; statistical analyses used log-transformed completion time. (C) Normalized excess distance relative to the optimal path. While Arrow and Minimap reduced excess distance relative to Compass, their difference was not significant. The vertical dashed line separates the Unaided baseline from the navigation-aid conditions; the Unaided block was always presented first and is shown for descriptive comparison only. Points represent individual participants and boxplots summarize condition distributions. Asterisks denote significance levels (ns $p \ge .05$, * $p < .05$, ** $p < .01$, **** $p < .001$).
• Figure 5: Secondary outcome measures across navigation aids. (A) Detection sensitivity ($d'$) for incidental objects. A modest difference was observed between Arrow and Minimap, with higher sensitivity under Arrow guidance, while other pairwise comparisons were not significant. (B) Self-reported stress ratings during navigation trials. Compass produced higher stress ratings than both Arrow and Minimap. (C) Subjective workload (NASA TLX-4). Arrow guidance produced lower workload than Compass, with other comparisons not reaching significance. The vertical dashed line separates the Unaided baseline from the others; the Unaided block was always presented first and is shown for descriptive comparison only. Points represent individual observations and boxplots summarize condition distributions.