Wayfinding Search Strategies and Matching Familiarity in the Built Environment through Virtual Navigation

There is an underestimation of the conscious and unconscious wayfinding search strategies in a virtual built environment without signage information. Wayfinding is the process of determining and following a path or route between an origin and destination. This is the base of the experiment discussed in this paper. Herein, the assignment was to find the destination and then return to origin in a virtual maze-like building. Subjects perform three different assignments given different locations for the destination and the start; each assignment was repeated two times subsequently. Each of the routes was recorded. Analysis of the recorded data shows a significant increasing familiarity of wayfinding. Furthermore, the increase of the number of subjects, who had chooses a route with minimal links for performing subsequent routes, is striking. That indicates whether or not consciously applying a search strategy. This paper reports about the results of analysis of familiarity and search strategies.