Investigating drivers’ geospatial abilities in unfamiliar environments

The prominence of landmarks in aiding pedestrian navigation has been highlighted in various studies; people rely strongly on visual landmarks, especially when navigating in unfamiliar environments. The paper describes the design and implementation of a study for assessing drivers’ spatial abilities, when navigating in an unfamiliar environment. Two types of route directions based on references to either landmarks or street names were given to two groups of participants. Three geospatial learning tasks are used to evaluate these abilities: map sketching, distance, and direction estimation. The findings showed that landmark-based route instructions help drivers develop a better cognitive map of the route. On the other hand, instructions either based on landmarks or on street information do not have an effect on distance or direction estimates. Nonetheless, qualitative analysis of directions and distances estimations gave interesting results. Findings associated with self-assessment of environmental spatial abilities using the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (SBSOD) seem to support prediction of at least one of the drivers’ abilities among those assessed in this study.

Hey You! Let’s Talk. Dialogue-Initiatives Revisited for Wayfinding Instructions

This paper presents Human-Computer Interaction design guidelines for interactive wayfinding assistance systems which provide on-line route instructions. These design suggestions are based on a corpus of human-to-human, on-line, landmark-based route instructions in German language which were gathered by means of an in-situ study involving pairs of participants. Based on the description of this collection, which is made publicly available, an in-depth analysis of the corpus is presented: This analysis reveals the importance of establishing Common Ground through existential-presentative constructions which have, up until now, not been taken into account in presenting route instructions to users of pedestrian navigation systems. These syntactical constructs provide the empirical ground for two important design suggestions: Systems should, first, ask for explicit feedback whether a salient object is recognised by users before referring to this object in a route instruction. Second, a mode of negotiating Common Ground once it was lost should be implemented, which can be initiated by the user. The results reveal the importance of the state-tracking capabilities of wayfinding assistance systems.

Determination of Evacuation Route and Gathering Points for Earthquake Disasters

Universitas Pembangunan Nasional “Veteran” Yogyakarta (UPNVY) is one of the campuses that stand on the area of disaster prone areas. Based on the information from the head of facilities and infrastructure section, installation of evacuation route instructions and gathering points at UPNVY is based solely on the experience that has occurred several years ago.Earthquake disaster 2006 and Merapi eruption 2010 that occurs, many users of the building are confused in rescues themselves for lack of evacuation instructions.It is very vulnerable to the onset of loss or casualties because the earthquake disaster is unpredictable and occurs suddenly.This research aims to create visualization of user simulation against earthquake disaster.The simulation will also show you where to come out and save yourself as well as avoiding the dangerous places of the building quickly and securely with 3 scenarios. Simulated results for Pattimura building, Scenario 2 is considered best with the evacuation time of 46 ' 51 "with 2 classes passing through the middle stairs and 2 classes through the East and West Stairs.Meanwhile, Cipto Mangunkusumo building was selected scenario 2 with an evacuation time of 49 ′ with 2 class routes passing through the East Stairs and 1 class through the western stairs.The need for disaster information signage is 90 board class evacuation line, 76 board stair evacuation Line, 1 board gathering point, and 3 point gathering boards.

User Preferences on Route Instruction Types for Mobile Indoor Route Guidance

Adaptive mobile wayfinding systems are being developed to ease wayfinding in the indoor environment. They present wayfinding information to the user, which is adapted to the context. Wayfinding information can be communicated by using different types of route instructions, such as text, photos, videos, symbols or a combination thereof. The need for a different type of route instruction may vary at decision points, for example because of its complexity. Furthermore, these needs may be different for different user characteristics (e.g., age, gender, level of education). To determine this need for information, an online survey has been executed where participants rated 10 different route instruction types at several decision points in a case study building. Results show that the types with additional text were preferred over those without text. The photo instructions, combined with text, generally received the highest ratings, especially from first-time visitors. 3D simulations were appreciated at complex decision points and by younger people. When text (with symbols) is considered as a route instruction type, it is best used for the start or end instruction.

Understanding landmark types in human navigation from a database perspective

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Delivering location based information to support human navigation in unfamiliar environments has been a long standing research topic in Location-based Service (LBS). Enriching route and direction communication with landmark information not only increases the efficiency of navigation applications but also facilitates spatial knowledge learning among users (Lovelace et al. 1999, Wunderlich &amp; Gramann 2018). Landmarks are salient geographic entities anchored at fixed positions in an environment. In wayfinding and navigation, landmarks serve for multiple purposes as and organizing concept that help people build up structured spatial knowledge representation and as navigational tools to support navigational decision-making (Sorrows &amp; Hirtle 1999). In previous work, landmarks are often conceptualized as reference points. However, in Geodatabase landmarks are not always represented as point features. Moreover, non-point features are also important references in route instructions, especially for pedestrian navigation. The signs, though often considered as point elements not only provide something about “here”, but also directional information (Gibson 2009). In this work, we attempt to provide a categorization of landmark for route communications from a database perspective. The proposed view is intended to be extended to a landmark model to generate various route communication, such as verbal instructions or symbolic visualizations.</p>

WIKIPEDIA ENTRIES AS A SOURCE OF CAR NAVIGATION LANDMARKS

Car navigation system devices provide today with an easy and simple solution to the basic concept of reaching a destination. Although these systems usually achieve this goal, they still deliver a limited and poor sequence of instructions that do not consider the human nature of using landmarks during wayfinding. This research paper addresses the concept of enriching navigation route instructions by adding supplementary route information in the form of landmarks. We aim at using a contributed source of landmarks information, which is easy to access, available, show high update rate, and have a large scale of information. For this, Wikipedia was chosen, since it represents the world’s largest free encyclopaedia that includes information about many spatial entities. A survey and classification of available landmarks is implemented, coupled with ranking algorithms based on the entries’ categories and attributes. These are aimed at retrieving the most relevant landmark information required that are valuable for the enrichment of a specific navigation route. The paper will present this methodology, together with examples and results, showing the feasibility of using this concept and its potential of enriching navigation processes.

WIKIPEDIA ENTRIES AS A SOURCE OF CAR NAVIGATION LANDMARKS

Car navigation system devices provide today with an easy and simple solution to the basic concept of reaching a destination. Although these systems usually achieve this goal, they still deliver a limited and poor sequence of instructions that do not consider the human nature of using landmarks during wayfinding. This research paper addresses the concept of enriching navigation route instructions by adding supplementary route information in the form of landmarks. We aim at using a contributed source of landmarks information, which is easy to access, available, show high update rate, and have a large scale of information. For this, Wikipedia was chosen, since it represents the world’s largest free encyclopaedia that includes information about many spatial entities. A survey and classification of available landmarks is implemented, coupled with ranking algorithms based on the entries’ categories and attributes. These are aimed at retrieving the most relevant landmark information required that are valuable for the enrichment of a specific navigation route. The paper will present this methodology, together with examples and results, showing the feasibility of using this concept and its potential of enriching navigation processes.

Examining the validity of the total dwell time of eye fixations to identify landmarks in a building

It is uncertain to what extent the duration of eye fixations reflects the use of landmarks during navigation. Therefore, a study was conducted in which eye tracking data and route descriptions were collected of 23 participants who were highly familiar with the indoor test environment. Based on the total fixation time on different landmark categories, two measures were calculated, namely the calculated landmark category use and the probable landmark category use. Based on the ratio between these measures an object was considered to be a landmark or not. The results were then compared with the objects referenced to in written route instructions. It can be concluded that promising results were provided by this method to identify landmarks. This landmark identification criterion strongly reflected the landmarks that came forward in the written route instructions. However, issues related to the identification of structural landmarks remain a problem.