Caution ahead: virtual cues for safer wayfinding

Mobile phones and other smart displays, such as in-car entertainment units, are widely used to display and dictate navigation routes. These navigation systems offer alerts about road closures, construction zones, and traffic conditions. However, these navigation applications often fail to dynamically update safety information in response to rapidly changing threats, such as public safety incidents. The current study explores virtual cues as an intermediate step toward developing augmented reality (AR) safety navigation aids. In a virtual reality (VR) environment simulating a safety-critical scenario, we evaluate two types of navigation cues: (1) a world-fixed localized, egocentric ground-area (GA) cue that visually highlights danger zones and (2) a screen-fixed allocentric minimap (MM) offering a global bird's-eye view of the danger areas and surroundings. The cues were evaluated using a free-navigation goal directed wayfinding task, in which participants were asked to navigate to a target beacon, answer affective questions providing trial-by-trial evaluation of affective states (i.e., spatial anxiety), and then asked to point to the last known threat location to evaluate spatial memory. Results show both cues were associated with minimal time in danger zones, but the minimap significantly decreased spatial anxiety ratings and increased participants' reports of willingness to walk the same route in the real world, compared to the GA cue. Further, higher self-reported navigation ability predicted better spatial memory within the virtual environment. These findings represent an initial step toward understanding how virtual cue design affects navigation behavior, affective states, and spatial memory in safety-critical environments.