The implications of inter-visibility between landmarks on wayfinding performance: An investigation using a virtual urban environment

We investigated the effect of inter-visibility conditions between landmark elements in a simulated 3D urban environment on wayfinding performance (the acquisition of spatial knowledge through direct experience within the simulated environment and navigation throughout this environment). Our experiment was conducted by means of a 3D virtual environment to test the effect of two properties of visibility conditions: the overlapping between the visual fields of two landmarks and the topological depth (length of visual chain) between these visual fields. The results show that a high degree of overlapping between the visual fields of an origin and a target landmark helps people perform wayfinding tasks, particularly in cases where the length of the visual chain is short (one-step topological depth).