Past studies suggest that learning a spatial environment by navigating on a desktop computer can lead to significant acquisition of spatial knowledge, although typically less than navigating in the real world. Exactly how this might differ when learning in immersive virtual interfaces that offer a rich set of multisensory cues remains to be fully explored. In this study, participants learned a campus building environment by navigating (1) the real-world version, (2) an immersive version involving an omnidirectional treadmill and head-mounted display, or (3) a version navigated on a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard. Participants first navigated the building in one of the three different interfaces and, afterward, navigated the real-world building to assess information transfer. To determine how well they learned the spatial layout, we measured path length, visitation errors, and pointing errors. Both virtual conditions resulted in significant learning and transfer to the real world, suggesting their efficacy in mimicking some aspects of real-world navigation. Overall, real-world navigation outperformed both immersive and desktop navigation, effects particularly pronounced early in learning. This was also suggested in a second experiment involving transfer from the real world to immersive virtual reality (VR). Analysis of effect sizes of going from virtual conditions to the real world suggested a slight advantage for immersive VR compared to desktop in terms of transfer, although at the cost of increased likelihood of dropout. Our findings suggest that virtual navigation results in significant learning, regardless of the interface, with immersive VR providing some advantage when transferring to the real world.

中文翻译：

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我们在虚拟现实中学到的知识有多少会转移到现实世界的导航中？

过去的研究表明，通过在台式计算机上导航来学习空间环境可以显着获取空间知识，尽管通常比在现实世界中导航要少。在提供丰富的多感官线索的沉浸式虚拟界面中学习时，这究竟有何不同仍有待充分探索。在这项研究中，参与者通过导航 (1) 真实世界版本，(2) 涉及全方位跑步机和头戴式显示器的沉浸式版本，或 (3) 在台式计算机上导航的版本，了解校园建筑环境鼠标和键盘。参与者首先在三个不同界面中的一个中导航建筑物，然后导航现实世界的建筑物以评估信息传输。为了确定他们对空间布局的了解程度，我们测量了路径长度、访问错误和指向错误。两种虚拟条件都导致了重要的学习和转移到现实世界，表明它们在模仿现实世界导航的某些方面是有效的。总体而言，现实世界的导航优于沉浸式导航和桌面导航，效果在学习早期尤为明显。在第二个涉及从现实世界转移到沉浸式虚拟现实 (VR) 的实验中也提出了这一点。对从虚拟条件到现实世界的效果大小的分析表明，与桌面相比，沉浸式 VR 在传输方面略有优势，但代价是丢失的可能性增加。我们的研究结果表明，无论界面如何，虚拟导航都能带来重要的学习效果，