For example, you might shop online for lawnmowers by going to a virtual house, looking for the lawnmower in the garage and clicking on it for more information. Putting the lawnmower in the virtual garage must seem intuitive to Bill Gates. He uses finding the lawnmower in the garage as an example of shopping with spatial navigation in his recent book The Road Ahead. In a K-Mart, the garden tools are in a different section from the automotive supplies. I would go to the garden section, or the tools section, or possibly even the hardware section before I would go to the automotive section to look for lawnmowers.
Virtual reality is woefully inefficient, as reality itself is, in sorting things out.
Imagine goin g into a K-Mart with no signs. N o signs on the walls and aisles would make things hard enough. The symbolic, written index to where things are is one of the great human inventions. Graphical user interfaces on personal computers have succeeded not because they are better at navigation than a well-designed verbal interface, but because they are prettier, more fun, display pictures and video, and allow you to do graphical tasks like desktop publishing. They tend to fail when the amount of information to be managed grows large.