The HIVE: a huge immersive virtual environment for research in spatial cognition.

Research in human spatial cognition has benefited from the advent of virtual environment (VE) technology; however, few VE systems currently enable users to move realistically over large physical spaces. Here, we describe a huge immersive virtual environment (HIVE) that offers untethered tracking of users in a 570 m2 physical space. This large tracking area allows users to move through virtual worlds in thesame manner in whichthey move in the real world and enables behavioral research in spatial cognition examining mental processes that require extensive movement through an environment. We provide a detailed description of this system, and report an experiment examining distance estimation in virtual environments that illustrates the utility of the HIVE.