Effects of redirection on spatial orientation in real and virtual environments

We report a user study that investigated the effect of redirection in an immersive virtual environment on spatial orientation relative to both real world and virtual stimuli. Participants performed a series of spatial pointing tasks with real and virtual targets, during which they experienced three within-subjects conditions: rotation-based redirection, change blindness redirection, and no redirection. Our results indicate that when using the rotation technique, participants spatially updated both their virtual and real world orientations during redirection, resulting in pointing accuracy to the targets´ recomputed positions that was strikingly similar to the control condition. While our data also suggest that a similar spatial updating may have occurred when using a change blindness technique, the realignment of targets appeared to be more complicated than a simple rotation, and was thus difficult to measure quantitatively.