The goal of this study is to explore new navigation methods in Virtual Reality (VR) and to understand the impact of motor activity on spatial cognition, and more precisely the question of the spatial learning transfer. We present a user study comparing two interfaces with different motor activities: the first one, a walking interface (a treadmill with rotation) gives the user a high level of sensorimotor activity (especially body-based and vestibular information). The second one, a brain computer interface (BCI), enables the user to navigate in a virtual environment (VE) without any motor activity, by using brain activity only. The task consisted in learning a path in a virtual city built from a 3D model of a real city with either one of these two interfaces (named treadmill condition and BCI condition), or in the real city directly (the real condition). Then, participants had to recall spatial knowledge, according to six different tasks assessing spatial memory and transfer. We also evaluated the ergonomics of these two interfaces and the presence felt by participants. Surprisingly, contrary to expectations, our results showed similar performances whatever the spatial restitution tasks or the interfaces used, very close to that of the real condition, which tends to indicate that motor activity is not essential to learn and transfer spatial knowledge. Even if BCI seems to be less natural to use than the treadmill, our study suggests that BCI is a promising interface for studying spatial cognition.