Virtual Reality pre-exposure supports wayfinding in a culturally and environmentally unfamiliar multi-level building: short- and long-term evidence from a cross-national study

As public buildings serve increasingly diverse user populations, many pedestrians must navigate environments whose layout, signage, and wayfinding logic are shaped by unfamiliar cultural conventions. This study examined whether Virtual Reality (VR) pre-exposure improves wayfinding in a multi-level Dutch building for participants in China, and whether such benefits persist over time and transfer to new wayfinding tasks. A reference group in the Netherlands completed one VR session, while participants in China completed the same VR wayfinding tasks as baseline, one day later, and again after 14 months. Additional new wayfinding tasks and a supplementary 2D-map pre-exposure condition were introduced to distinguish repeated-route improvement from broader spatial knowledge transfer. We found that, at baseline, participants in China generally required more time, travelled longer distances, and showed higher head-rotation rates than the reference group, suggesting lower efficiency under combined cultural and environmental unfamiliarity. After initial VR exposure, participants in China showed significant reductions in travel time and distance across all original tasks, and much of this improvement remained evident after 14 months. New wayfinding tasks showed that VR familiarization supported route reversal, navigation to new destinations within previously experienced areas, and visual-place recognition, but did not clearly benefit navigation to an unexposed area. Compared with 2D-map pre-exposure, retained VR familiarization produced stronger performance on the original wayfinding tasks and several within-area transfer tasks, but not on the unexposed-area task. These findings suggest that VR pre-exposure can provide durable, route-relevant familiarity, while its transferability remains bounded by the scope of prior virtual exploration.