Mapping the Evolutions and Trends of Literature on Wayfinding in Indoor Environments

Research on indoor wayfinding has increased in number and significance since the 1980s. Yet, the information on wayfinding literature is now difficult to manage given its vast scope and spread across journals, institutions, disciplines, and themes. While there is an increasing number of publications within this rapidly growing field of research, there are limited review studies in the field, and there is still missing an overall analysis of the current state of wayfinding literature and its evolution. The main objective of this study is to present a bibliometric analysis of about forty years of research on indoor wayfinding to provide an overview of the research landscape. The final database of the study contained 407 publications. VOSviewer was used as a science mapping software tool to identify major focus areas and to identify influential authors, publications, and journals using various network analysis techniques, such as term co-occurrence, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling. Similar co-occurrence analysis was used to understand how the intellectual base of the field has evolved over time and what the major themes are that have contributed to this evolution. The results show that this field has initially been mainly focused on few themes but has later become more diversified to acknowledge the multi-dimensional characteristics of indoor wayfinding. While spatial knowledge acquisition and cognitive maps are still dominant core areas, there are topics, such as signage, isovists, and the use of eye-tracking and virtual reality, that still need to be further investigated.

Developing an Indoor Navigation Application: Identifying the Needs and Preferences of Users Who Are Visually Impaired

Introduction: This study identified users’ indoor navigation concerns, prototype feature preferences, and perceptions of the relative importance and difficulty of certain building types in order to guide the development of an accurate and user-friendly indoor navigation application. Methods: Six-hundred fourteen adult volunteers who are legally blind from the 7,000-member Sendero global positioning system (GPS) electronic discussion group completed a 27-item survey instrument using Survey Monkey Pro online. Data were analyzed using chi-square and cross tabulation statistics. Results: Participants felt points of interest were the most important type of indoor information, that ability to know their location at any time the most important application feature, and verbal output with auditory and vibrational cues, the best output mode. Airports and bus or rail transit facilities scored highest as important buildings for navigation systems, and sports arenas and airports scored highest as difficult buildings to navigate. Chi-square analyses demonstrated that gender and GPS use were related to travel confidence. In addition, GPS use was related to user age, degree of reading vision, and employment. Discussion: The findings demonstrate user preferences for an indoor wayfinding application and high-priority building types. Regardless of stated preferences, it is important to allow the user to customize the application settings. The judgments on building importance of participants provide data on which to prioritize future site development. The chi-square analyses were exploratory in nature and designed to discover possible relationships. Implications for practitioners: Vision education and rehabilitation professionals can use the findings to understand the process of accessible indoor navigation and structure lessons accordingly. Developers can improve their products. Both groups can know and understand the indoor wayfinding perceptions and opinions of more than 600 individuals who are legally blind.

A Gamification-Based Approach on Indoor Wayfinding Research

Indoor environments can be very complex. Due to the challenges in these environments in combination with the absence of mobile wayfinding aids, a great need exists for innovative research on indoor wayfinding. In this explorative study, a game was developed in Unity to investigate whether the concept of gamification could be used in studies on indoor wayfinding so as to provide useful information regarding the link between wayfinding performance, personal characteristics, and building layout. Results show a significant difference between gamers and non-gamers as the complexity of the player movement has an important impact on the navigation velocity in the game. However, further analysis reveals that the architectural layout also has an impact on the navigation velocity and that wrong turns in the game are influenced by the landmarks at the decision points: navigating at deeper decision points in convex spaces is slower and landmarks of the categories pictograms and infrastructural were more effective in this particular building. Therefore, this explorative study, which provides an approach for the use of gamification in indoor wayfinding research, has shown that serious games could be successfully used as a medium for data acquisition related to indoor wayfinding in a virtual environment.

Gaze Point in the Evacuation Drills: Analysis of Eye Movement at the Indoor Wayfinding

Signage systems are the main means of resolving the wayfinding problem in an emergency evacuation. However, recent literature has proven that signage systems are often not effective in an indoor wayfinding decision-making situation. Many studies that attempted to solve the problem did not consider the interaction between the optimal location of signage systems and gaze characteristics. Therefore, this study aimed to provide basic database to determine the optimal location of signage by analysing the characteristics of eye movements according to the type of junction. To achieve this, we conducted evacuation experiments in a maze set composed of eight junctions that we created ourselves and analysed the eye movement data of participants with 5196 gaze points and duration of 895,581.49 ms. The result showed that participants most often look between 100 cm and 150 cm (vertical height) in the corridor and in junctions. In addition, the gaze points of the evacuees are quantified by the horizontal and vertical directions according to the type of junction where the wayfinding decisions occur. This investigation showed that there are marked differences depending on the type.