The effect of the configuration and the interior design of a virtual  weightless space station on human spatial orientation.
In a virtual weightless environment, subjects' orientation skills were studied to examine what kind of cognitive errors people make when they moved through the interior space of virtual space stations and what kind of visual information effectively decreases those errors. Subjects wearing a head-mounted display moved from one end to the other end in space station-like routes constructed of rectangular and cubical modules, and did Pointing and Modeling tasks. In Experiment 1, configurations of the routes were changed with such variables as the number of bends, the number of embedding planes, and the number of planes with respect to the body posture. The results indicated that spatial orientation ability was relevant to the variables and that orientational errors were explained by two causes. One of these was that the place, the direction, and the sequence of turns were incorrect. The other was that subjects did not recognize the rotation of the frame of reference, especially when they turned in pitch direction rather than in yaw. In Experiment 2, the effect of the interior design was examined by testing three design settings. Wall colors that showed the allocentric frame of reference and the different interior design of vertical and horizontal modules were effective; however, there was a limit to the effectiveness in complicated configurations.
Aoki
Hirofumi
H
Research Center for Carbon Recycling and Energy, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. haoki@chem.titech.ac.jp
Ohno
Ryuzo
R
Yamaguchi
Takao
T
D000328:Adult; D006804:Ergonomics; D005160:Facility Design and Construction; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007374:Interior Design and Furnishings; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D011187:Posture; D013028:Space Perception; D018531:Spacecraft; D013037:Spatial Behavior; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014796:Visual Perception; D018474:Weightlessness Simulation