The HIVE: A huge immersive virtual environment for research in spatial cognition

摘要

Research in human spatial cognition has benefited from the advent of virtual environment (VE) technology; however, few VE systems currently enable users to move realistically over large physical spaces. Here, we describe a huge immersive virtual environment (HIVE) that offers untethered tracking of users in a 570 m~2 physical space. This large tracking area allows users to move through virtual worlds in the same manner in which they move in the real world and enables behavioral research in spatial cognition examining mental processes that require extensive movement through an environment. We provide a detailed description of this system, and report an experiment examining distance estimation in virtual environments that illustrates the utility of the HIVE.