Using a map in an unfamiliar environment requires identifying correspondences between elements of the map's allocentric representation and elements in egocentric views. Aligning the map with the environment can be challenging. Virtual reality (VR) allows learning about unfamiliar environments in a sequence of egocentric views that correspond closely to the perspectives and views that are experienced in the actual environment. We compared three methods to prepare for localization and navigation tasks performed by teleoperating a robot in an office building: studying a floor plan of the building and two forms of VR exploration. One group of participants studied a building plan, a second group explored a faithful VR reconstruction of the building from a normal-sized avatar's perspective, and a third group explored the VR from a giant-sized avatar's perspective. All methods contained marked checkpoints. The subsequent tasks were identical for all groups. The self-localization task required indication of the approximate location of the robot in the environment. The navigation task required navigation between checkpoints. Participants took less time to learn with the giant VR perspective and with the floorplan than with the normal VR perspective. Both VR learning methods significantly outperformed the floorplan in the orientation task. Navigation was performed quicker after learning in the giant perspective compared to the normal perspective and the building plan. We conclude that the normal perspective and especially the giant perspective in VR are viable options for preparing for teleoperation in unfamiliar environments when a virtual model of the environment is available.

When we move through a real environment, egocentric location representations are effortlessly and automatically updated. While moving in synthetic environments, this effortless, continuous spatial updating is often disrupted or incomplete due to a lack of sensory, especially body-based, movement information. To prevent disorientation in virtual reality caused by missing body-based information, the support of spatial updating via other sensory movement cues is necessary. In the presented experiment, participants performed a spatial updating task in a sparse virtual scene presented inside a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). The task was to navigate back to a starting position after simulated movements with either no orientation cues, three visible distant landmarks or one continuous auditory cue present. The focus was not to compare visual and auditory cues but to explore the viability of auditory cueing with visual cues as a reference. Overall, the data showed improved task performance when an orientation cue was present, with auditory cues providing at least as much improvement as visual cues. Our results indicate that auditory cues in virtual environments can support spatial updating when body-based information is missing.