  Mobile navigation apps are among the most used mobile applications and are
often used as a baseline to evaluate new mobile navigation technologies in
field studies. As field studies often introduce external factors that are hard
to control for, we investigate how pedestrian navigation methods can be
evaluated in virtual reality (VR). We present a study comparing navigation
methods in real life (RL) and VR to evaluate if VR environments are a viable
alternative to RL environments when it comes to testing these. In a series of
studies, participants navigated a real and a virtual environment using a paper
map and a navigation app on a smartphone. We measured the differences in
navigation performance, task load and spatial knowledge acquisition between RL
and VR. From these we formulate guidelines for the improvement of pedestrian
navigation systems in VR like improved legibility for small screen devices. We
furthermore discuss appropriate low-cost and low-space VR-locomotion techniques
and discuss more controllable locomotion techniques.
