The Impact of Colour Coding in Virtual Reality Navigation Tasks

Colour coding is known to have a significant impact on navigation tasks in the real world by showing the way where to go or by highlighting certain regions in a building where specific activities are performed. Colour coding is frequently used in large buildings, such as hospitals, to help patients navigate and locate clinics. However, it is still not well known how colour coding works in virtual reality systems, or its influence on tasks such as navigation and situation awareness. In this experiment, we explore the impact of colour coding on a navigation task by comparing participants' performances in a virtual world. Five different mazes with the similar level of complexity are attributed to various schemes. In the first experiment, participants are asked to find the exit in a virtual maze without any assistance; in the second and third experiments, participants are provided with a two-dimensional (2D) map with and without a global positioning system (GPS) as a guide to find the exit; in the fourth and fifth experiments, participants are provided with a 2D map with the selected colours embedded along the routes and with and without a GPS to indicate direction. The experimental results will provide evidence on how the colour-coding scheme influences user performance in a virtual world navigation task. This may have a strong influence on the future design of virtual reality training systems.