The ramblers guide to virtual environments

Virtual environments offer some useful advantages over the real world, for example the ability to jump to anywhere within the environment at the click of a mouse button. Moving around a 3D environment using mouse movements alone can be a time consuming and tedious process, and therefore it is necessary to have a means of decreasing the effort and increasing the accuracy of navigation. But if all movement in the virtual environment is replaced by teleporting directly to a destination, how are users going to develop knowledge of the spatial organisation of the environment? The authors discuss some of the reasons why spatial awareness of a virtual environment is important to the user's experience and suggest three concepts for navigation aids that can encourage this awareness, and how they could be implemented in virtual environments.