  The recent availability of digital traces from Information and Communications
Technologies (ICT) has facilitated the study of both individual- and
population-level movement with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution,
enabling us to better understand a plethora of socioeconomic processes such as
urbanization, transportation, impact on the environment and epidemic spreading
to name a few. Using empirical spatiotemporal trends, several mobility models
have been proposed to explain the observed regularities in human movement. With
the advent of the World Wide Web, a new type of virtual mobility has emerged
that has begun to supplant many traditional facets of human activity. Here we
conduct a systematic analysis of physical and virtual movement, uncovering both
similarities and differences in their statistical patterns. The differences
manifest themselves primarily in the temporal regime, as a signature of the
spatial and economic constraints inherent in physical movement, features that
are predominantly absent in the virtual space. We demonstrate that once one
moves to the time-independent space of events, i.e the sequences of visited
locations, these differences vanish, and the statistical patterns of physical
and virtual mobility are identical. The observed similarity in navigating these
markedly different domains point towards a common mechanism governing the
movement patterns, a feature we describe through a Metropolis-Hastings type
optimization model, where individuals navigate locations through
decision-making processes resembling a cost-benefit analysis of the utility of
locations. In contrast to existing phenomenological models of mobility, we show
that our model can reproduce the commonalities in the empirically observed
statistics with minimal input.
