  Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly being used as a research platform for
investigating human responses to environmental variables. While VR provides
tremendous advantages in terms of variable isolation and manipulation, and ease
of data-collection, some researchers have expressed concerns about the
ecological validity of VR-based findings. In the current study we replicated a
real-world, multi-level educational facility in VR, and compared data collected
in the VR and real-world environments as participants (n=36) completed
identical wayfinding tasks. We found significant differences in all of the
measures used, including distance covered, number of mistakes made, time for
task completion, spatial memory, extent of backtracking, observation of
directional signs, perceived uncertainty levels, perceived cognitive workload,
and perceived task difficulty. We also analyzed potential age-related effects
to look for heightened VR/real response discrepancies among older adult
participants (>55 years) compared to younger adults. This analysis yielded no
significant effects of age. Finally, we examined the spatial distribution of
self-reported wayfinding uncertainty across the building floorplan, finding
that areas in which uncertainty was most pronounced were similar between the
real-world and VR settings. Thus, participants appeared to be responding to the
same environmental features in the real and VR conditions, but the extent of
these responses was significantly different. Overall, the findings suggest that
when VR is used to contrast varying environmental design conditions the
resulting data should be interpreted cautiously and should not be generalized
into real-world conclusions without further validation.
