A USABILITY EVALUATION OF A 3D MAP DISPLAY FOR PEDESTRIAN NAVIGATION

In this paper the infl uence of the display size on the acquisition of spatial knowledge is investigated. The acquisition of spatial knowledge based on presentation forms with different display sizes has been analysed in an empirical test for pedestrian navigation. This contribution describes and interprets the test and results and gives an outlook on the overall importance for future application developments in the context of LBS, as mobile systems typically use small displays and the overall concern exists, that these displays can not communicate any useful spatial information in typical map form to pedestrians.

Abstract. Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of navigation systems. They gradually become the default way of navigating in our daily life. Despite benefiting from their convenience, we may be negatively influenced by them (Parush et al. 2007). Current navigation systems usually draw too much of users' attention to the mobile devices, which leads to users’ lacking interaction with the environment. It is often the case that people easily forget travelled route and get lost without navigation systems (Reilly et al. 2008). Empirical study shows that by dividing attention, navigation systems impair users’ spatial memory, and thus impact their navigation skills (Gardony et al. 2013). Since a higher engagement with the environment can improve users’ spatial knowledge acquisition without decreasing efficiency (Brügger et al. 2017), navigation systems should incorporate important environmental features.As objects of visual, cognitive or structural importance (Sorrows & Hirtle 1999), landmarks have been extensively studied, and considered as an important environmental feature to be incorporated into navigation systems (Nuhn & Timpf 2018, Richter 2017, Duckham et al. 2010, Raubal & Winter 2002). They serve as references to provide users with more natural and pleasant navigating experience (Richter & Winter 2014). However, most of landmark-related studies are in outdoor environment. Although researchers have attempted to classify and assess indoor landmarks (Ohm 2014, Viaene 2014), it is still very difficult to determine suitable ones. As a subset of semantic indoor landmarks, existing navigational aids (e.g. signs and floor plans) are designed to assist navigation. Among them, signs are most preferred by users (Wang et al. 2017). Being the signs that give necessary information to route users to possible destinations, directional signs contribute most to wayfinding (Gibson 2009). With route information explicitly presented by them, they are relevant environmental features to be incorporated into indoor navigation systems.In this study, we therefore propose to incorporate directional signs into indoor navigation systems, in order to guide users’ attention back to the environment, to facilitate their spatial learning and improve their spatial knowledge acquisition.We incorporated directional signs into a proof-of-concept indoor navigation system. First, we integrated directional signs and their semantics into a graph-based model. A directional sign was modelled as a node. Each destination on the sign was linked with the sign by an edge. In order to differentiate it from the normal edge, it was marked as semantic edge. Thus, the semantics of the sign was modelled directly into the graph, instead of being stored as attributes in a previous version of our study (Wang & Gartner 2018). Then, a top-K shortest path algorithm was employed to find candidate routes (Yen 1971). In the end, the route with the largest coverage of semantic edges was suggested to the user. The users would then be explicitly guided to follow the directional signs in the environment.In the next step, we will evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed navigation system by an empirical study with human subjects. Within the experiment, we will also investigate on whether this kind of guidance can succeed in drawing users’ attention back to the environment and support their spatial knowledge acquisition.

Mobile devices have been impacting on human standard of living by providing timely and accurate information anywhere and anytime through wireless media in developing nations. Shortage of experts in medical fields is very obvious throughout the whole world but more pronounced in developing nations. Thus, this study proposes a telemedicine platform for the vulnerable areas of developing nations. The vulnerable area are the interior with little or no medical facilities, hence the dwellers are very susceptible to sicknesses and diseases. The framework uses mobile devices that can run LightWeight Agents (LWAs) to send consultation requests to a remote medical expert in urban city from the vulnerable interiors. The feedback is conveyed to the requester through the same medium. The system architecture which contained AgenRoller, LWAs, The front-end (mobile devices) and back-end (the medical server) is presented. The algorithm for the software component of the architecture (AgenRoller) is also presented. The system is modeled as M/M/1/c queuing system, and simulated using Simevents from MATLAB Simulink environment. The simulation result presented show the average queue length, the number of entities in the queue and the number of entities departure from the system. These together present the rate of information processing in the system. A full scale development of this system with proper implementation will help extend the few medical facilities available in the urban cities in developing nations to the interiors thereby reducing the number of casualties in the vulnerable areas of the developing world especially in Sub Saharan Africa.

A novel approach to automatic navigation and map display is described. In order for a navigation and display system to be both cost effective and useful in automobiles, solutions are needed to problems in navigation, map database, data storage, and display.

Spatial navigation in the absence of vision has been investigated from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. These different approaches have progressed our understanding of spatial knowledge acquisition by blind individuals, including their abilities, strategies, and corresponding mental representations. In this review, we propose a framework for investigating differences in spatial knowledge acquisition by blind and sighted people consisting of three longitudinal models (i.e., convergent, cumulative, and persistent). Recent advances in neuroscience and technological devices have provided novel insights into the different neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation by blind and sighted people and the potential for functional reorganization. Despite these advances, there is still a lack of consensus regarding the extent to which locomotion and wayfinding depend on amodal spatial representations. This challenge largely stems from methodological limitations such as heterogeneity in the blind population and terminological ambiguity related to the concept of cognitive maps. Coupled with an over‐reliance on potential technological solutions, the field has diffused into theoretical and applied branches that do not always communicate. Here, we review research on navigation by congenitally blind individuals with an emphasis on behavioral and neuroscientific evidence, as well as the potential of technological assistance. Throughout the article, we emphasize the need to disentangle strategy choice and performance when discussing the navigation abilities of the blind population. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:37–58. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1375For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Concepts of spatial navigation rest on the idea of landmarks, which are immobile features or objects in the environment. However, behaviorally relevant objects or fellow humans are often mobile. This raises the question of how the presence of human agents influences spatial exploration and knowledge acquisition. Here, we investigate exploration and performance in subsequent spatial tasks within a virtual environment containing numerous human avatars. In the exploration phase, agents had a locally limited effect on navigation. They prompted participants to revisit locations with agents during their initial exploration without significantly altering overall exploration patterns or the extent of the area covered. However, agents and buildings competed for visual attention. When spatial recall was tested, pointing accuracy toward buildings improved when participants directed their attention to the buildings and nearby agents. In contrast, pointing accuracy for agents showed weaker performance and did not benefit from visual attention directed toward the adjacent building. Contextual agents and incongruent agent-environment pairings further enhanced pointing accuracy, revealing that violations of expectations by agents can significantly shape navigational knowledge acquisition. Overall, agents influenced spatial exploration by directing attention locally, with the interaction between agent salience and environmental features playing a key role in shaping navigational knowledge acquisition.

With the development of the internet and mobile devices, tourists have been able to obtain information and then travel to various places or participate in diverse tourism activities in one travel excursion. This study investigates the patterns of tourist participation in tourism activities according to a tourism information source used through a relational approach using a social network analysis (SNA). This study utilizes raw data from 2021 Gyeonggi tourist survey data distributed by the Gyeonggi Tourism Organization. Our results indicate different patterns of participation in tourism activities between tourists using online sources and those using offline sources. In addition, the tourism activity distribution patterns of the centralities were hierarchically structured and differentiated depending on the tourism information source. The present study then offers theoretical implications and future study avenues, as well as practical implications, focused on developing tourism marketing strategies and content for the Gyeonggi province, South Korea.

Pedestrian navigation systems often use the relative semantics of pedestrians and their environments to provide navigation guidance. Relative semantics include spatial and visual semantics. However, most navigation data models are based on an absolute reference frame and do not support the organization of relative semantics. To address this deficiency, we propose a pedestrian navigation data model based on relative semantic images that organizes the relative semantics of landmarks and environments directly in the image channels. Using geographic data for a university campus, we compared the data file size, data access time, and memory usage to confirm that the proposed approach outperforms the geodatabase approach in storing and accessing the relative semantic data. Two examples, self‐localization and route guidance, demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed data model. This model can support fast pedestrian navigation on mobile devices in small and medium‐sized areas.

From the precise location data calculated from satellite signals, Global Positioning System makes itself the effective navigation system in the mobile devices yet the cost of which being the higher energy consumption. Being the energy constrained device, the mobile devices thus need the alternative energy efficient navigation system. The pedometer that counts the foot steps taken by the pedestrian, thereby calculating the average distance covered, when integrated with the device's orientation during locomotion, can pave the way for the pedestrian's navigation system. By increasing the efficiency of pedometer using gait analysis and by taking step vectors rather than simply steps, the effective navigation system for pedestrians can be provided. And, this project aims at such energy efficient less GPS dependent navigation system for pedestrians using the mobile sensors-Accelerometer, Magnetometer and Gyroscope for gait analysis and finding orientation.

Pedestrian navigation using the sense of touch

Heading estimation plays an important role in pedestrian navigation applications. With the advent of smart-phones equipped with MEMS sensors, it has become possible to utilize ones orientation information along with location. This combination has allowed researchers to investigate provisioning users with orientation aware location based services as well as seamless navigation in different environments using Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) techniques. Although gyroscopes are considered to be the primary sensors for orientation estimation, the errors associated with these sensors require periodic updates from other sources. In case of small hand held devices, these other sources are accelerometers for roll and pitch estimates and magnetic field sensors for the heading. In order to utilize the magnetic field sensors for heading estimation with respect to some known reference, it is desirable to measure only the Earth's magnetic field components. Although this is achievable in the outdoors, presence of manmade infrastructure in all kinds of urban environments makes it impossible to sense only the Earth's magnetic field at all times. These manmade magnetic anomalies caused by electronic devices, ferrous materials, mechanical and electrical infrastructures among others are the main culprits contaminating the magnetic field information. Therefore it is desirable to investigate how good one can estimate the heading using magnetic field alone in different pedestrian navigation environments by isolating the perturbed regions from the clean ones. In this paper, a detector is proposed that can identify the magnetic field measurements that can be used for estimating heading with adequate accuracy. The expected errors in the heading estimates are also output based on the test statistics, which allow the proposed detector to be utilized for sensor fusion and estimation of errors associated with gyroscopes. Real world data is acquired using a custom designed consumer grade sensor platform and a high accuracy reference system. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed detector is capable of identifying the effects of perturbations on the Earth's magnetic field, which provides users with a better estimate of magnetic heading in different pedestrian navigation environments.

The Versatile Wayfinder: Prefrontal Contributions to Spatial Navigation.

Locating a vehicle is important for diverse reasons and applications. Currently, locating a vehicle is being performed through Global Positioning System (GPS). The GPS is a space navigation system which provides the location information of a mobile transceiver device. Nevertheless, GPS would fail if there is an obstructed line of sight between the mobile transceiver and the satellites, such as tall buildings which can be found in urban cities. In this paper, an alternative system is introduced to be used in urban cities instead of the GPS. The introduced system uses a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) to locate a vehicle on roads. Although VANET is a new networking technology which is still under research, it has been assumed that it is available and providing a valid communication between vehicles and the road side infrastructure. At the end of the paper, a set of results of the simulated and implemented system is shown and discussed.

Individual differences in spatial navigation

The purpose of Development The Media Learning Augmented Reality Book 2 Dimensions With The Natural Environment Theme In PAUD Telkom Singaraja is to develop 2-dimensional Augmented Reality learning media sub-theme of the natural environment on the Android platform, as a medium to facilitate the learning process and provide attractiveness in understanding the natural environment. The development of 2-dimensional Augmented Reality learning media with the sub-theme of the natural environment uses the ADDIE model which consists of stages, namely the analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation stages. In this model, an evaluation process is carried out at each stage that is passed so as to produce learning media that suits the needs of PAUD Telkom Singaraja. The end result of this development is in the form of 2-dimensional Augmented Reality learning media with a sub-theme of the natural environment that can be used via mobile devices with the Android operating system. The black box and white box tests were carried out accordingly, the content expert test and the media test got a value of 1.00 in the very high category, the individual test got an average value of 94,22% in the very good category, the small group test got an average score of 94,44% with very good category student response, field test 92.89% with very good category and teacher response 90,66% with very good category.