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Abstract

How do we find our way in everyday life? In real world situations, it typically takes a considerable amount of time to get completely lost. In most Virtual Reality (VR) applications, however, users are quickly lost after only a few simulated turns. This happens even though many recent VR applications are already quite compelling and look convincing at first glance. So what is missing in those simulated spaces? Why is spatial orientation there not as easy as in the real world? In other words, what sensory information is essential for accurate, effortless and robust spatial orientation? How are the different information sources combined and processed?

In this thesis, these and related questions were approached by performing a series of spatial orientation experiments in various VR setups as well as in the real world. Modeling of the underlying spatial orientation processes finally led to a comprehensive framework based on logical propositions, which was applied to both our experiments and selected experiments from the literature.