Comparison of auditory, visual, and audio-visual navigation in a 3D space

Abstract

A navigation test was carried out in a spatially immersive virtual environment. The test was a game-like experience where task of subjects was to find as many gates as possible while they navigated through a track guided by auditory and/or visual cues of the gates. The results are presented as a function of the number of found gates, searching times, and normalized path lengths. Audio-visual navigation was clearly the most efficient. Visual navigation was the second, and the auditory navigation the least efficient. Further analysis of travel paths indicate that auditory cue was utilized in the beginning to locate the next gate, and visual cue was the most important in the final approach to the gate.