Cartographic Visualization for Indoor Semantic Wayfinding

Abstract

In recent years, pedestrian navigation assistance has been used by an increasing number of people to support wayfinding tasks. Especially in unfamiliar and complex indoor environments such as universities and hospitals, the importance of an effective navigation assistance becomes apparent. This paper investigates the feasibility of the indoor landmark navigation model (ILNM), a method for generating landmark-based routing instructions, by combining it with indoor route maps and conducting a wayfinding experiment with human participants. Within this context, three different cartographic visualization scenarios were designed and evaluated. Two of these scenarios were based on the implementation of the ILNM algorithm, with the concurrent effort to overcome the challenge of representing the semantic navigation instructions in two different ways. In the first scenario, the selected landmarks were visualized as pictograms, while in the second scenario, an axonometric-based design philosophy for the depiction of landmarks was followed. The third scenario was based on the benchmark approach (metric-based routing instructions) for conveying routing instructions to the users. The experiment showed that the implementation of the ILNM was feasible, and, more importantly, it was beneficial in terms of participants' navigation performance during the wayfinding experiment, compared to the metric-based instructions scenario (benchmark for indoor navigation). Valuable results were also obtained, concerning the most suitable cartographic approach for visualizing the selected landmarks, while implementing this specific algorithm (ILNM). Finally, our findings confirm that the existence of landmarks, not only within the routing instructions, but also as cartographic representations on the route map itself, can significantly help users to position themselves correctly within an unfamiliar environment and to improve their navigation performance.The main problem of indoor navigation assistance approaches is the lack of accurate GPS signal, since it can only be used efficiently outside of buildings (radio signals cannot penetrate through walls). Due to this fundamental technical weakness, different approaches to overcome this problem were presented. These approaches can be based on the use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ultra-wideband (UWB), near-field communication (NFC), etc.Traditional static maps have been employed for many years as navigational assistance [2]. Nonetheless, indoor navigation aids nowadays, mainly rely on location-based services (LBS) [3][4][5]. In these approaches, aside from the major challenge of accurate positioning the user, communicating effectively the routing instructions is of great significance as well [6]. So far, several approaches have been proposed, informing the user about the optimal routing decision, facilitating in this manner the wayfinding procedure. Among these techniques, non-map-based approaches are gaining interest, mainly because they offer to the user the possibility of not missing important elements o...

Towards Conducting Reproducible Distributed Experiments in the Geosciences

“…The third case study is a replication of another experiment of a graduate student, as a continuation of earlier research in indoor wayfinding (Wang et al, 2017), inspired by Bakogiannis et al (2019). In an LBS indoor navigation scenario, a "Wizard of Oz" prototyping strategy (Kelley, 1984) is employed by showing the user a hypothetical indoor navigation user interface, which is in fact a mock-up controlled by the experimenter, who is walking a few steps behind the participant.…”