The effects of hyperlinks on navigation in virtual environments

✍ Scribed by ROY A. RUDDLE; ANDREW HOWES; STEPHEN J. PAYNE; DYLAN M. JONES

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 359 KB
• Volume: 53
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1071-5819
• DOI: 10.1006/ijhc.2000.0402

✦ Synopsis

Hyperlinks introduce discontinuities of movement to 3-D virtual environments (VEs). Nine independent attributes of hyperlinks are de"ned and their likely e!ects on navigation in VEs are discussed. Four experiments are described in which participants repeatedly navigated VEs that were either conventional (i.e. obeyed the laws of Euclidean space), or contained hyperlinks. Participants learned spatial knowledge slowly in both types of environment, echoing the "ndings of previous studies that used conventional VEs. The detrimental e!ects on participants' spatial knowledge of using hyperlinks for movement were reduced when a time-delay was introduced, but participants still developed less accurate knowledge than they did in the conventional VEs. Visual continuity had a greater in#uence on participants' rate of learning than continuity of movement, and participants were able to exploit hyperlinks that connected together disparate regions of a VE to reduce travel time.

2000 Academic Press