Bridging Subjective Experience and Objective Measures: A Novel Method for Assessing Indoor Wayfinding Efficiency Using Virtual Environments

Abstract: With the accelerating pace of global urbanisation and the demand for high-quality urbanisation in China, enhancing spatial experience has emerged as a critical issue in urban-architectural design. Accurately evaluating the efficiency of built space usage from a perspective that better aligns with users' subjective experiences provides empirical evidence for urban regeneration and design decision-making. Wayfinding performance in large public buildings, as a key indicator of spatial utilisation efficiency, has become a significant interdisciplinary research focus in fields such as urban-architecture studies, human factors, and neuroscience.Traditional methods for assessing wayfinding efficiency primarily rely on two data collection approaches: individual on-site tracking experiments and spatiotemporal distribution records for groups. The former often struggles to pinpoint participants' precise positions, while the latter fails to capture specific individual behaviours during wayfinding tasks. Due to limitations in trajectory data accuracy, previous methods face challenges in precisely identifying when and where wayfinding errors, such as backtracking or looping, occur—behaviours often associated with subjective recognition of wayfinding errors. These methods typically assess wayfinding efficiency by comparing total path length with the shortest path, overlooking the role of spatial features in shaping perception during wayfinding and their alignment with subjective experiences.This study aims to establish and validate a novel objective approach for assessing indoor wayfinding efficiency that better aligns with users' subjective experiences.To address the limitations of previous methods in accurately evaluating wayfinding performance in large public buildings, this research employs a high-fidelity immersive virtual environment to collect spatiotemporal location data during wayfinding tasks. By utilising built-in scripts, the study achieves precise tracking of participants' trajectories and fixation points, significantly improving the accuracy of individual spatiotemporal data and semantic analysis of fixation points, with temporal and spatial resolutions reaching 0.05 seconds and 0.01 metres, respectively.To address the misalignment between traditional wayfinding efficiency assessment methods and subjective user experiences, this study introduces a new evaluation metric: the proportion of time spent on valid routes (defined as trajectories traversed only once, without any circular movements). This approach considers the influence of spatial features on perceptual baselines during wayfinding, producing efficiency metrics that better reflect participants’ subjective cognition in large public buildings.To validate this novel method, an experimental case study was conducted in a virtual reality environment. Data from 25 participants were collected, including approximately 1.9 × 10⁵ eye-tracking data points, spatiotemporal location records, and 25 cognitive maps. Correlation analyses between wayfinding efficiency and the accuracy of cognitive maps, combined with subjective questionnaire responses, demonstrated that the proposed method effectively captures participants’ subjective spatial cognition during wayfinding.This research provides a framework for objectively assessing indoor wayfinding efficiency that integrates subjective experiences, offering valuable insights for the design and reconstruction of large public buildings.

Keywords: Wayfinding efficiency, Virtual environments, Ergonomic analysis, Indoor space

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006613

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