Spatial orientation in 3-D desktop displays: using rooms for organizing information

Understanding how spatial knowledge is acquired is important for spatial navigation and for improving the design of 3-D perspective interfaces. Configural spatial knowledge of object locations inside rooms is learned rapidly and easily (Colle & Reid, 1998), possibly because rooms afford local viewing in which objects are directly viewed or, alternatively, because of their structural features. The local viewing hypothesis predicts that the layout of objects outside of rooms also should be rapidly acquired when walls are removed and rooms are sufficiently close that participants can directly view and identify objects. It was evaluated using pointing and sketch map measures of configural knowledge with and without walls by varying distance, lighting levels, and observation instructions. Although within-room spatial knowledge was uniformly good, local viewing was not sufficient for improving spatial knowledge of objects in different rooms. Implications for navigation and 3-D interface design are discussed. Actual or potential applications of this research include the design of user interfaces, especially interfaces with 3-D displays.