We compared three common guidance techniques for immersive VR wayfinding: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass.
Varshney and Turkstra win ISMAR 2026 Best Paper Award
Their work on immersive VR wayfinding was one of just eight papers selected for a Best Paper Award from 754 submissions.
Bionic Vision Lab researchers Apurv Varshney and Lily M. Turkstra received a Best Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) for their paper, Actionable Guidance Outperforms Map and Compass Cues in Demanding Immersive VR Wayfinding. Varshney and Turkstra contributed equally to the work, together with Jiaxin Su, Mable Zhou, Scott T. Grafton, Barry Giesbrecht, Mary Hegarty, and Michael Beyeler.
The study compared three common forms of navigation guidance in a demanding immersive VR task: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass. Across 42 participants and more than 1,000 navigation trials, the arrow produced the strongest performance, suggesting that guidance designed to directly support the next movement decision can outperform richer spatial information that requires more interpretation.
Only eight papers received a Best Paper Award at ISMAR 2026, placing the work among the top 1.1% of the conference’s 754 paper submissions.
Publications
Actionable guidance outperforms map and compass cues in demanding immersive VR wayfinding Best Paper AwardIn the News
Apurv Varshney*(co-first author) 
Lily M. Turkstra*(co-first author) 
Jiaxin Su Mable Zhou 
Scott T. Grafton 
Barry Giesbrecht 
Mary Hegarty 
Michael Beyeler
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) Special Issue on the 25th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
PhD Student
Apurv Varshney is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. He develops computer vision and interactive systems that help people navigate complex environments more effectively.
PhD Candidate
Lily Turkstra is a PhD candidate in Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. She studies the human side of sight restoration, asking what happens after vision is restored and how people learn to make useful sense of artificial vision.