Abstract:

Abstract: Most of the information used by people for the cognitive mapping of spaces is gathered through the visual channel. In addition, before navigating an unknown space people often collect information using resources such as maps, pictures, or drawings. Due to the lack of visual ex- perience, there are some flaws exist in blind’s spatial cognition, especially in understanding the spatial layout of the real environment. The study explores the effectiveness of virtual reality technology in assisting the blind to construct the spatial representation of the real life environments. On the basis of that, it explores the effectiveness of blind’s mobility & orientation in the building. The study will be a field trial that it randomly assigns the subjects to three groups, including the human guide group, the virtual reality group, and the tactile maps group. Subjects in each group accept different trainings and tests, which not only investigate their representation of large-scale space, but also measures their efficiency of wayfinding in the reality environment. The results show that:( 1 ) In terms of characterizing spatial representation, virtual reality technol- ogy and tactile maps can assist blind in constructing spatial representation of unfamiliar environment, to help them to be familiar with the environment in advance and to make mobility orientation effective in the real environment ultimately. The subjects in virtual reality group are adept at using virtual envir- onments to optimize their path exploring strategy, i.e. While exploring path in virtual environment, the subjects would convert the self-referential strategy into the reference strategy, which makes them mu- ch easier to construct an accurate spatial representation of the reality environm- ent-environments. ( 2 ) In terms of real walking, the virtual reality group and the tactile maps group can apply the spatial re- presentation obtained into real walking task, which contribute to their mobility & orientation. However，the performance of human guide group is the worst，they can not construct the spatial representation, and mobility & orientation in the environments is not well. ( 3 ) There is a significant relationship bet- ween the ability of construction of spatial representation and the effectiveness of path exploring, that with great ability of the spatial representation,the subjects would have great ability of mobility & ori- entation and they could find more objects. That is to say, the effectiveness of path exploring in reality environments can be predicted by the ability of construction of spatial representation. The study demonstrated that the subjects in virtual technology group could not only form a clear representation of the whole environment, but also apply the precise spatial representation of environm- ent to effective mobility orientation in the reality environment. Moreover, from the resluts, the virtual reality technology could be applied to improving the blind’s spatial representation system and the effi- ciency of mobility & orientation. The innovation of the study is that, adopting with field trial method and case phenomenon description, to explore the effectiveness of virtual reality technology for assisting blind’s construction of the spatial representation and mobility & orientation. The result has a great significance for exploring the education of blind’s mobility orientation.