Comparison of pedestrian wayfinding behavior between a real and a virtual multi-story building – A validation study

Although numerous studies used Virtual Reality (VR) to study pedestrian behavior, there is an ongoing debate about the validity of using VR for studying pedestrian behavior. This study aims to contribute toward the validation of immersive VR systems for pedestrian wayfinding behavior studies by conducting a direct comparison of a field experiment and a matched virtual experiment. Both experiments feature three identical wayfinding assignments across multiple floors in a building. To evaluate the ecological validity of VR, three metrics of three different levels of wayfinding behavior are adopted, namely travel time (level: wayfinding performance), wayfinding strategy (level: decision-making), and angular speed of the head (level: observational behavior). Our findings show that VR can be used to study pedestrian wayfinding strategy in buildings with a single floor. However, there are significant differences in pedestrian wayfinding strategy between the field experiment and the VR experiment. Additionally, we found significant differences in the angular speed of the head between the two experiments. It suggests that researchers should take caution when using VR as a research tool to study the wayfinding strategy and the observational behavior of pedestrians in multi-story buildings. •This study provides a direct comparison of a field and matching VR experiment.•This study aims to validate pedestrian behavior in a virtual multi-story building.•This study focuses on pedestrian wayfinding performance and decision-making.•This study suggests similar decision-making choices for single-story building.•This study indicates that caution should be taken when VR is the sole research tool.