Large Displays Enhance Optical Flow Cues and Narrow the Gender Gap in 3-D Virtual Navigation

OBJECTIVE Existing reports suggest that males significantly outperform females in navigating 3-D virtual environments. Although researchers have recognized that this may be attributable to males and females possessing different spatial abilities, most work has attempted to reduce the gender gap by providing more training for females. In this paper, we explore using large displays to narrow the gender gap within these tasks. BACKGROUND While evaluating various interaction techniques, we found that large displays affording wider fields of view seemed to improve virtual navigation performance in general and, additionally, to narrow the gender gap that existed on standard desktop displays. METHOD We conducted two experiments (32 and 22 participants) exploring the individual contributions of display and geometric fields of view to the observed effects as well as isolating factors explaining performance increases seen on the large displays. RESULTS We show that wider fields of view on large displays not only increase performance of all users on average but also benefit females to such a degree as to allow them to perform as well as males do. We further demonstrate that these benefits can be attributed to better optical flow cues offered by the large displays. CONCLUSION These findings provide a significant contribution, including recommendations for the improved presentation of 3-D environments, backed by empirical data demonstrating performance benefits during navigation tasks. APPLICATION. Results can be used to design systems that narrow the gender gap in domains such as teleoperation and virtual environments for entertainment, virtual training, or information visualization.