Is Seeing a Virtual Environment Like Seeing the Real Thing?

Immersive virtual environments (IVE) are increasingly used in both fundamental research like experimental psychology and applications such as training, phobia therapy, or entertainment. Ideally, people should be able to perceive and behave in such IVEs as naturally and effectively as in real environments – especially if real-world transfer is desired. Being inherently mobile species, enabling natural spatial orientation and cognition in IVEs is essential. Here, we investigated whether seeing a virtual environment has a similar effect on our spatial cognition and mental spatial representation as a comparable real-world stimulus does – if it does not, how could we assume real-world transfer?