Schweizerischer Nationalfonds / Fonds national suisse
Lost in the mall - wayfinding in complex multi-level shopping centres
Bern (ots)
Open floor plans with atriums or galleries and the ability to mentally map the surroundings help with wayfinding in complex buildings. This is the finding from a study supported by the SNSF involving a virtual shopping trip.
Who hasn't gone round and round in circles in a shopping centre looking for a particular store? Or had trouble finding their way back to the car park? In situations like these, some people find their sense of direction is quickly pushed to its limits.
A research team funded by the SNSF has looked at the strategies people use to find their way round buildings with complex floor plans, and what types of architecture can help with wayfinding.
Locating ten stores in a virtual shopping centre
For this purpose, the researchers sent just under 70 test subjects equipped with VR headsets on a tour of a virtual shopping centre. The shopping centre was modelled on the real-life Westgate Shopping Mall in Singapore.
Their task was to locate ten specific shops one after the other in the complex building with a confusingly large number of levels and corridors. If they managed to do so, they then had to return to four of these shops in a second attempt.
The researchers not only tracked the participants' paths through the virtual shopping mall. They also used eye trackers integrated into the headsets to observe where the searchers were looking.
At the end of the experiment, the test subjects also had to produce a 3D sketch of the building based on their mental map. A practice exercise was conducted to ensure that they had mastered the relevant computer program. Previous studies have shown that this method allows mental spatial representations to be reliably translated into drawings.
The analysis provided insights into the way people orient themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. "In principle, there are two different strategies, but they can also be used in parallel," says Christian Vater from the Institute of Sport Science at the University of Bern.
Vater carried out the study at ETH Zurich together with Christoph Hölscher. The strategies were already known, but the team examined them more closely using novel methods.
Remembering a plant or making a mental note of paths
Some people remember clearly visible reference points. These can be a large plant or a prominent sculpture, for example. "These 'landmarks' then serve as a sort of anchor to locate other places," says Vater. The gaze analysis provided strong evidence of this type of wayfinding.
Others make a mental note of movement paths and turnings, to create a sort of floor plan in their heads. The analysis of the drawings showed that the more accurate the 3D sketches of the shopping centre - and these can be taken as an indicator of the quality of the mental map of the surroundings - the more efficient the previous wayfinding exercise had been.
"We noticed that the skills involved in the two strategies are highly individual," says Vater. He believes, however, that spatial orientation skills can be trained - although this has not yet been researched in depth. Depending on which strategy someone prefers, they could either consciously focus on landmarks or consciously create a mental model of the building.
The greater the overview, the better
The tracking of movement paths and gaze also helped the researchers understand which architectural elements help make wayfinding easier. Wide corridors were very helpful, for example. The gaze analyses clearly showed that the shops sought were spotted sooner when the corridors were wide.
An atrium with a view over several levels also made test subjects' lives easier. A restaurant called '4 fingers Crispy Chicken', which also exists in the real-life mall in Singapore, was particularly eye-catching. It stood out because of its colourful signage, but also the fact that it was visible from almost everywhere. This means that test subjects remembered this shop particularly well and were almost always able to locate it correctly on their mental maps. "Eye tracking during the navigation task, followed by 3D sketches, is a suitable method to study the cognitive processes involved in navigating complex buildings. This study has highlighted this for the first time," says Vater. In the past, researchers mostly worked with two-dimensional maps, which are not suited to multi-storey buildings.
The use of virtual reality also proved effective. As surveys revealed, the test subjects did not find that the technology represented an additional cognitive load. Comparisons with the results of other studies in real-life surroundings show that the virtual shopping trip comes very close to a real one. However, studies also reveal that distance perception in VR is slightly worse than in real life. And motion sickness can cause some people to feel unwell. Such analyses could in future help design large building complexes in a more user-friendly way. Because, as Vater concludes: "visiting a shopping centre is meant to be a pleasant experience after all."
The text of this news, download images and further information are available on the website of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Contact:
Christian Vater
Institute of Sport Science
University of Bern
Phone: +41 31 684 50 89
Email: christian.vater@unibe.ch