The effect of trails on first-time and subsequent navigation in a virtual environment

Trails are a little-researched type of aid that offers great potential benefits for navigation, especially in virtual environments (VEs). An experiment was performed in which participants repeatedly searched a virtual building for target objects assisted by: (1) a trail, (2) landmarks, (3) a trail and landmarks, or (4) neither. The trail was displayed as a white line that showed exactly where a participant had previously traveled. The trail halved the distance that participants traveled during first-time searches, indicating the immediate benefit to users if even a crude form of trail were implemented in a variety of VE applications. However, the general clutter or "pollution" produced by trails reduced the benefit during subsequent navigation and, in the later stages of these searches, caused participants to travel more than twice as far as they needed to, often accidentally bypassing targets even when a trail led directly to them. The proposed solution is to use gene alignment techniques to extract a participant\´s primary trail from the overall, polluted trail, and graphically emphasize the primary trail to aid navigation.