## 5 Discussion and Conclusions
### Exploration of User Activities and Strategies  
Since the experimental group's exploration times and times spent pausing appeared to follow normal distribution, we can assume that the experimental conditions are adequate for collecting data in larger samples. This would only need to be reconsidered if a more spacious/complex virtual environment were employed. The option to visualize the individual paths of participants' walkthroughs as virtual trajectories in different ways (Figure 5; Figure 6a,b, and potentially by other means) also allows us to conduct precise qualitative analyses to understand exploration strategies, while numerical results provide the opportunity to harvest a large amount of data for testing hypotheses with inferential statistics. To visualize our data, we used the Processing programming language. Since this language contains an internal data structure that can load tables (e.g., CSV files), the data could be analyzed rather easily. Based on the collected data, the following visual outputs could be produced: use of the interface by the participant, behavioral patterns and temporal/spatial movement through the virtual space (as a 2D map or an interactive 3D render). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Method**} & **Preservation of** & **Attitude to Temporal** & **Suitable for Groups** & **Statistical or** & **Dimensionality** \\  & **Spatial Component** & **Component** & **of Users** & **Numerical Comparison** & **of Data** \\ \hline
**Gridded AoI** & yes & aggregation & yes & yes & 2D or 3D \\
**Statistics** & no & aggregation or selected & yes & yes & 2D or 3D \\ \hline
**Video** & yes & preservation & only individual users & only visual & 3D \\
**Views (cecemshots)** & yes & preservation & only individual users & only visual & 3D \\
**Virtual trajectory** & yes & preservation & only individual users & only visual & 2D or 3D \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Comparison of methods of analysis or visualization of user interaction and virtual movement according to their application. When the paths traveled by all the participants were combined (Figure 6a,b), for the most part participants followed existing pathways/routes present in the environment, only rarely straying off the path. We hypothesize that this behavior may tie to [PERSON]'s affordance theory [60] with consideration to the surrounding environment (e.g., [PERSON] et al. [61])--in other words, where a man-made path is meant to be walked, regardless of the path being or not being the optimal route to travel through said environment. Other surroundings and patterns in the terrain may also have predetermined participants' behaviors. Overall, the participants preferred to visit open and flat areas, even though all areas up to 45 degrees of terrain elevation in the VGE were accessible and the participants did not need to invest any real physical effort to reach them (e.g., climbing a hill--a false affordance [60] in a virtual setting). When the surrounding terrain was constrained or elevated rapidly (height differences, sprawling vegetation, large objects occluding the view), straying from the path was far less frequent. Travelling along the centers of areas may have served the participants as the most efficient strategy in acquiring the most visual information from their surroundings and allowed connections to other potential routes [62]. Similarly, the areas off the path may have provided little to no incentive (relevant information) for exploration. If, however, the accessible surroundings had looked inviting and were furnished with interesting and detailed objects, they may have been inclined to explore the area in order to add these stimuli to their growing spatial knowledge [63]. Follow-up research to verify these route selection hypotheses is required. For this purpose, experimental environments with various (un)interesting areas populated by deliberately pre-placed objects of interest may be created. Such environments may or may not include man-made roads.