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Dominant approaches in computer-assisted wayfinding support adhere to the deeply problematic principles of turn-by-turn navigation. In this article, we suggest a new approach called “Wayfinding Through Orientation,” which supports the acquisition of spatial knowledge and cognitive mapping for advancing the user’s spatial orientation. Being oriented...
Citations
... A tour guide robot [1,2] is one such example. Compared with other methods [3], a robot-based tour guide has the advantage of not requiring any changes to the environment, such as landmarks [4], directional signs [5], and beacons [6]. Iio et al. reported [7] that people wanted to use the robot's guidance again. ...
This paper proposes a novel tour guide robot, “ASAHI ReBorn”, which can lead a guest by hand one-on-one while maintaining a proper distance from the guest. The robot uses a stretchable arm interface to hold the guest’s hand and adjusts its speed according to the guest’s pace. The robot also follows a given guide path accurately using the Robot Side method, a robot navigation method that follows a pre-defined path quickly and accurately. In addition, a control method is introduced that limits the angular velocity of the robot to avoid the robot’s quick turn while guiding the guest. We evaluated the performance and usability of the proposed robot through experiments and user studies. The tour-guiding experiment revealed that the proposed method that keeps distance between the robot and the guest using the stretchable arm enables the guests to look around the exhibits compared with the condition where the robot moved at a constant velocity.
... With the rise in technological devices, reliance on GPS-based systems to aid human navigation has become significantly more prevalent (He & Hegarty, 2020;McKinlay, 2016). Numerous studies have shown that using GPS-based systems may be detrimental to human navigation performance, as assessed using self-report questionnaires (He & Hegarty, 2020;Ishikawa, 2018) computerised and real-world studies (Dahmani & Bohbot, 2020;Fenech et al., 2010;Gardony et al., 2018;Hejtmanek et al., 2018;Ishikawa et al., 2008;Kippel et al., 2010;Parush et al., 2007;Ruginski et al., 2019;Schelton et al., 2013;Schwering et al., 2017;Willis et al., 2008). For example, the negative effect of spatial anxiety on one's self-reported sense of direction was mediated by a greater reliance on GPS (He & Hegarty, 2020), and that greater reliance on GPS was significantly associated with poorer spatial memory when participants were required to find their way in an environment they had learnt without using GPS (Dahmani & Bohbot, 2020). ...
Recent evidence suggests that greater reliance on GPS-assisted devices is associated with poorer navigation ability. Contrastingly, studies have shown that video gaming can enhance navigation ability. While gender differences in navigation ability in favour of men are well-reported, it remains unclear if the effects of reliance on GPS and video gaming on navigation performance are influenced by gender. We investigated whether gender would influence the effect of gaming experience and reliance on GPS on navigation ability using the mobile app Sea Hero Quest, which has been shown to predict real-world wayfinding performance. Alongside navigation performance assessment we asked a series of self-report questions relating to reliance on GPS, navigation strategies and gaming experience with a group of US-based participants (n = 822, 280 men, 542 women, mean age = 26.3 years, range = 18-52 years). A multivariate linear regression model found no significant association between reliance on GPS and navigation performance for either gender. There was a significant association between weekly hours of video gaming and navigation performance which was not moderated by gender. After accounting for video game experience, gender was no longer significantly associated with navigation performance. These findings have implications for which daily activities may enhance or disrupt specific cognitive abilities. Future studies applying an interventional design and real-world navigation testing would be useful to determine whether video games playing increases navigation skill, or whether those who are good at navigating tend to play more video games.
... In this model, the different knowledge types are gradually acquired and eventually lead to a comprehensive understanding of the layout of the spatial environment. The effective communication of orientation information through digital media has been highlighted as an important way of improving survey knowledge acquisition during navigation (Schwering et al., 2017). There is evidence that spatial knowledge is not just acquired gradually, with Ishikawa & Montello (2006) demonstrating that most participants on a driven route acquired accurate survey knowledge in the first session. ...
... With respect to navigational interfaces, GPS navigation systems make spatial learning more difficult compared to learning with maps or through direct experience (Ishikawa et al., 2008). It is argued that this can be improved by emphasising orientation information rather than turn-by-turn information (Schwering et al., 2017). Highlighting and providing information about landmarks (for global orientation) makes it easier to acquire spatial knowledge and learn the layout of the spatial environment (Gramann et al., 2017;Löwen et al., 2019). ...
A fundamental problem in geospatial interface designs is how aspects of user cognition may be incorporated into their design structures for improved reasoning, decision making, and comprehension in geographic spaces. Narrative environments are one such example of geographic spaces, where stories are told and visually displayed. Recently, geospatial narrative environments have become a popular medium for visualising information about space and time in the Earth sciences. Consequently, effective ways of enhancing user cognition in these environments through visual narrative comprehension is becoming increasingly important, particularly for the development of interactive learning environments for geo-education. It was hoped that subtle visualisations of future tasks (environmental precues) could be incorporated into an ambient narrative interface that would improve user cognition and decision making in an immersive 3D virtual narrative environment, which acted as an experimental analogue for how the interface could operate in real-world environments. To address this, a hybrid navigational interface called Future Vision was developed. In addition to controller-based locomotion, the interface provides subliminal environmental precues in the form of simulated future thoughts by teleporting the user to a future location, where the outcome of a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) decision making task could be briefly seen. The navigational effectiveness of the interface was analysed using the Steering law: a geographic analysis technique for trajectory-based human-computer interactions. The results showed that Future Vision enhanced participants' navigational abilities through improvements in average task completion times and movement speed. When comparing the experimental interface (Future Vision) with the ii control interface (an HTC Vive controller), the results showed that the experimental interface was 2.9 times as effective for navigation. This was in comparison to an improvement of 3.3 times for real walking when compared to navigation using an Xbox 360 game controller in another study. The similarity in these values suggests that Future Vision allows for more realistic walking behaviours in virtual environments. Improvements were also seen in the 2AFC decision making task when compared to participants in the control group, who were unguided in their decision making. These improvements occurred even when participants reported being unaware of the precues. In addition, Future Vision produced a similar information transfer rate to brain-computer interfaces in virtual reality, where participants move virtual objects via motor imagery and the imagined performance of actions through thought. This suggests that visualisations of future thoughts operate in a motor imagery paradigm that is associated with the generation and execution of a user's goals and intentions. The results also suggest that Future Vision behaves as an optimally designed cognitive user interface for ambient narrative communication during navigation and decision making. Overall, these findings demonstrate how extended reality narrative style GIS digital representations may be incorporated into cognitively inspired geospatial interfaces. When employed in real or virtual geographic narrative environments, these interfaces may allow for new types of quantitative GIS analysis techniques to be carried out in the cognitive sciences, leading to insights that may result in improved geospatial interface designs in the future.
... The different parts of a route route-route route-building route-cellphone cellphone-building cellphone-cellphone cellphone-car route-car building-car green area-cellphone green area-route building-building green area-green area car-car on the cell phone, between the cell phone and route, and also between the cell phone and building for justifying this. These preliminary findings highlighted several challenges (e.g., the distraction of wayfinders from the environment, lack of clarity of the route instructions, and lack of information components in the route instructions for wayfinders) arising when using the route instructions provided by assistive navigation technologies as mentioned in several papers such as [40][41][42][43][44]. In this experiment, as mentioned previously, the participant was unfamiliar with the study area and so the experiment was an exploratory trip that returns the participant to a familiar starting point. ...
People with mobility disabilities (PWMD) often struggle with challenges in getting around independently for their daily activities. Mobility is one of the most important life habits which might be constrained by diverse environmental and social obstacles, limiting the social participation of PWMD. Upgrading the social integration of these people is a major challenge in Canada and internationally. Even though the advent of assistive navigation technologies improves the interaction of PWMD with their environments during their mobility, these tools mostly ignore the capabilities, capacities, and specific needs of this population. It is required to better understand PWMD’s navigational behavior in the environment to make these navigation tools adapted to their profile and specific needs. Hence, this research aims at using state-of-the-art technology (i.e., eye-tracking glasses) to explore the navigational behavior of PWMD. To do so, we designed and carried out an experiment in which a wheelchair user wearing eye-tracking glasses navigated a route following the instructions given by Google Maps. Several eye-tracking metrics for the collected eye movement data were computed and analyzed to explore the participant’s visual and mental activities while performing the navigation task. Artificial intelligence was used to automatically assign eye movement data to specific features in the environment during navigation. The preliminary findings of this research show that the highest level of fixation was assigned to the cell phone for receiving the route instructions, distracting thus the participant from his surroundings. In this sense, we have noticed that these route instructions were not sufficient and clear for wheelchair users in some situations. In addition, fixations on sidewalks and crosswalks were the second-highest amount because of the low accessibility level of several parts of the route. Some buildings as landmarks were also eye-catching for the wheelchair user during exploring the environment, and searching for the route, particularly when the route was accessible. In this way, it is required to help the wheelchair user to become aware of information on the accessibility of routes and salient environmental objects in advance to draw more attention to the environment, better orient in the environment, and make sure of following the correct route, therefore, upgrading wheelchair users’ spatial learning and being autonomous.KeywordsWheelchair users’ mobilityEye trackingArtificial intelligence
... Coordinated, goaloriented movement across the environment is called navigation, one of the important factors of wayfinding (Montello & Sas, 2006). Knowing one's location in relation to the destination and other places or objects is another basic information requirement of wayfinding that is referred to as orientation (Schwering et al., 2017). The experience of disorientation, especially if it happens repeatedly, might intensify anxiety about performing wayfinding tasks, which is called spatial anxiety; that is to say, wayfinding strategies are associated with lower levels of spatial anxiety (Lawton, 1994). ...
... In their questionnaire, three factors of "navigation and orientation," "spatial anxiety," and "distance estimation" were introduced as wayfinding abilities. However, in the present study, the questions of the "navigation and orientation" section were divided because these two abilities are totally different from each other (Montello & Sas, 2006;Schwering et al., 2017); therefore, the current study evaluates four wayfinding factors: navigation (7 items), orientation (4 items), spatial anxiety (8 items), and distance estimation (3 items). ...
Objectives:
Physical and visual elements that help people find their way around an environment are called visual cues (VCs). The current study aims to evaluate adults' wayfinding abilities (navigation, orientation, spatial anxiety, and distance estimation) and VC (navigational color coding) preferences in terms of color and position; additionally, investigates their differences in adults' life span phases (young adults, early middle-aged adults, and late middle-aged adults).
Background:
Wayfinding in complex environments such as healthcare centers has been challenging for most people. Although VCs are being used increasingly to facilitate wayfinding, considering people's preferences regarding VCs, especially navigational color coding, are neglected.
Methods:
Obtained data from a survey of 375 healthcare center visitors with textual and photo questionnaires were analyzed by descriptive statics and one-way analysis of variance.
Results:
Young adults preferred VCs with "mixed colors and positioned in the middle of the floor," early middle-aged adults preferred "warm color VCs in the middle of the wall," and late middle-aged adults preferred "warm color VCs at the bottom of the wall." Additionally, the results demonstrated that with aging, navigation and distance estimation abilities deteriorate, and spatial anxiety increases.
Conclusions:
The outcomes of the present study increase our knowledge regarding the impact of adults' life span phases on their wayfinding abilities and VC preferences and offer suggestions for architects and healthcare center stakeholders to provide environments that improve adults' wayfinding.
... Another example for focusing on human-computer interaction in geoAI is the use of spatial concepts and relations in spatial representations and processing that match human concepts. Often used in applications targeted to layman users, such as navigation assistance or location-based services, work includes qualitative spatial representations and reasoning [14], the use of spatial and semantic hierarchical structures in representing environments [54,67], identifying features of an environment that allow linking local actions or views, e.g., in wayfinding, with the overall, global structure of a space [59,63], or the generation [45] and resolution [21] of spatial referring expressions, among others. ...
Taken literally, geoAI is the use of Artificial Intelligence methods and techniques in solving geo-spatial problems. Similar to AI more generally, geoAI has seen an influx of new (big) data sources and advanced machine learning techniques, but also a shift in the kind of problems under investigation. In this article, we highlight some of these changes and identify current topics and challenges in geoAI.
... For example, conceptual higher-level categories might have vague boundaries or be different for different participants (Montello et al. 2003). Schwering et al. (2017) described a dataset that shows signs of a systematic bias in city-based pointing estimates, but the source of this bias is speculative. In their paper, participants were divided into two groups: the control group Editor: Albert Postma (2022-03-22); Reviewers: two researchers who prefer to remain anonymous. ...
... Thus, the presence of "route effect" within direction estimations seems possible but cannot be assumed based on the results from distance estimation tasks alone. Theoretically, Fig. 1 Part of the figure originally presented in Schwering et al. (2017). Top: All pointings to the zoo (indicated with a dot) made by the control group. ...
... Some distortions in survey knowledge caused by barriers and deviating routes have already been shown with distance estimates. To our knowledge, however, the impact of barriers on direction estimates has not been yet studied, except for the accidental finding discussed by Schwering et al. (2017). The presence of barriers in the urban environment provides a natural opportunity to investigate the effect of embodied and grounded property of human cognition on direction estimation. ...
When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining measures of participants' survey knowledge, i.e., their estimate of distant locations relative to other places. Previous work showed that distance estimations are consistently biased when no direct route is available to the queried target or when participants follow a detour. Here we investigated whether a corresponding bias is manifested in two other popular measures of survey knowledge: a pointing task and a sketchmapping task. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a systematic bias in pointing/sketchmapping performance associated with the preferred route choice in an applied urban setting. The results were mixed. We found moderate evidence for the presence of a systematic bias, but only for a subset of urban locations. When two plausible routes to the target were available, survey knowledge estimates were significantly biased in the direction of the route chosen by the participant. When only one plausible route was available, we did not find a statistically significant pattern. The results may have methodological implications for spatial cognition studies in applied urban settings that might be obtaining systematically biased survey knowledge estimates at some urban locations. Researchers should be aware that the choice of urban locations from which pointing and sketchmapping are performed might systematically distort the results, in particular when two plausible but diverging routes to the target are visible from the location.
... There is increasing empirical evidence suggesting an adverse impact of these systems on spatial cognition. Mitigating this potentially adverse impact is the topic of current research (e.g., [2][3][4][5]). ...
... One approach is to enhance the turning instructions with additional information about landmarks [23] and, in turn, render them more engaging. Providing more contextual information about the environment is another option [2]. Further improvement suggestions include the enhancement with haptic feedback [24]. ...
... The missing improvement in spatial knowledge has several potential reasons: (1) The users need more support, e.g., a map display on demand [74], although other results suggest that audio-only instructions can lead to comparable spatial knowledge acquisition such as smartphone or AR-based navigation [8]; (2) The users may also need information between junctions to improve orientation and trust [75]; (3) The user needs more time to familiarize with the FCN navigation approach to have more trust in the system; (4) Making own decisions does not guarantee enhanced spatial knowledge acquisition, although it has the potential to do so [33]; (5) Making own decisions does not mean full engagement with the environment and looking around in all directions [73]. It is also possible that the participants were only attentive around the junctions but not in between. ...
In recent years, there has been collected evidence suggesting that increased usage of navigation assistance systems has a harmful effect on spatial cognition, including spatial knowledge acquisition. Previously, we proposed a potential remedy called Free Choice Navigation (simulation study). This novel navigation approach aims to provide the user with more freedom while navigating, and simultaneously give fewer navigation instructions. This approach also aims at increasing engagement with the environment and fostering spatial knowledge acquisition. We conducted a human-subject study with 48 participants comparing Free Choice Navigation with the widespread Turn-by-Turn approach on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria. The study showed the viability of our navigation system in real urban environments, providing fewer navigation instructions compared to the Turn-by-Turn approach (relative to the number of traversed junctions). Fewer instructions and forced engagement with the environment, however, did not result in differences concerning spatial knowledge acquisition, but interestingly, Free Choice Navigation users (without a map) could extract spatial configuration information similarly well as Turn-by-Turn users having a map. Moreover, we provide evidence that people are interested in learning more about their environments and are willing to walk longer routes to achieve it.
... For these reasons, several researchers proposed the use of schematic cartography for wayfinding with car route maps (Gartner & Radoczky, 2005;Godfrey & Mackaness, 2017;Lavie et al., 2011;Richter, 2008;Schwering et al., 2017;Tversky et al., 2020). The unsolved challenge of schematic maps for driving is that they should be optimized for the current route while simultaneously visualizing the surrounding street network. ...
... Moreover, the schematic map required less scale changes throughout driving which leads to a more stable map visualization. The study results indicate the potential of schematics on navigation systems to assist spatial knowledge acquisition, a topic that gained interest in recent research (Huang et al., 2012;Liu et al., 2021;Schwering et al., 2017). However, visualizing the surrounding street network is crucial because it supports map users identifying the"skeleton" of a city or a larger region, supporting hierarchical spatial knowledge acquisition with elements distant from the route Löwen et al., 2019). ...
... This shows that even though the route network is not needed for the task at hand, map users still prefer to see it. As argued by Schwering et al. (2017), seeing the surrounding route network is an important aspect of staying spatially oriented in the environment . This result is in line with previous studies on schematic route maps (Agrawala & Stolte, 2001;Galvão et al., 2020Galvão et al., , 2021Lavie et al., 2011) and underscores the good readability of the schematic routes used in the R+N maps. ...
Car drivers can benefit from schematized maps because they require a different level and type of information from different areas of the map. The technical challenge of creating such maps is that a schematic car route map should be optimized for the individual route, and yet simultaneously present the surrounding street network to support orientation. Existing schematization algorithms focus either on routes (without including the surrounding street network) or on the street network (without optimizing the route schematic layout). This paper addresses this lack of methods in schematization research and proposes an algorithm that is able to schematize both the route and the surrounding street network while resolving their conflicting layout criteria. We follow a two-step approach: we optimize the route layout criteria and afterward add the surrounding street network adapting it to the schematic route distortions. Our schematic ‘route + network’ maps aim to satisfy three requirements: (i) better readability of the route with respect to its decision points, (ii) preserving the qualitative characteristics of the surrounding street network while adapting it to route distortions, (iii) better visibility of alternative routes within the street network. A user study with six example maps validates our layout.
... Due to its nature, ATCF navigation uses sparse navigation cues and supports exploration [30]; both traits that are believed to improve spatial knowledge acquisition [5,15]. Furthermore, through the lack of TBT instructions, ATCF navigation could improve learning spatial configurations during active wayfinding [42]. Thus, with most mobile navigation devices for cyclists being only slight adaptations of their car and pedestrian counterparts using visual and audible TBT instructions, ATCF navigation is a promising alternative. ...
... As-the-crow-flies navigation utilizes cyclists' freedom to move beyond the confines of the dedicated car road network and people's own ability to navigate their environment [18] by providing a sense of orientation [42]. However, related work finds problems with the user experience that hinder its widespread adoption. ...
... These insights will help make the navigation method more usable in all kinds of environments and thus encourage cycling around the world. In turn, making cycling not only a more sustainable mode of transportation in environmental terms but could also have a lasting effect on cyclists' spatial abilities [42], escaping the tyranny of TBT navigation [37]. ...
As-the-crow-flies (ATCF) navigation is an alternative to turn-by-turn navigation for cyclists utilizing the least-angle strategy by providing the beeline to the destination. However, past research found weaknesses (e.g., running into dead ends) affecting the user experience. In this paper, we investigate how the street network attributes to the experience of the navigation method. Using a feature importance analysis and comparison of different city types across 1633 cities, we analyze how ATCF navigation fits different environments. The perfect ACTF-city has long streets, many options to turn at decision points, few dead ends, and a grid-like structure. Cities well suited are primarily found in East Asia and North America. Furthermore, we find that previous ATCF studies were most likely conducted in Western Europe, which features the least suited street networks for the navigation method. We present design implications for future ATCF implementations and argue for diverse study locations in future research.
