Development and verification of a VR platform to evaluate wayfinding abilities

This study proposes a VR-based tool, named ldquovirtual city,rdquo to evaluate wayfinding abilities that are reported to decline with some cognition dysfunctions, such as dementia. This platform was designed according to cognition theories and took advantage of convenience of real-time recording by using VR techniques to make the evaluations less subjective and more accurate. Our previous study has shown the feasibility of using VR techniques to evaluate the sense of direction; we further use this newly developed tool to assess the effect of ldquoscreen typerdquo and ldquoreference landmarkrdquo on wayfinding performances. Experimental results show that subjects perform better with true-size 3D visual displays and reference landmarks, suggesting the factors that need to be considered for clinical application by using VR tools to detect cognition impairment in wayfinding.