Which Way Is ‘Yildiz Amfi̇’? Augmented Reality vs. Paper Map on Pedestrian Wayfinding

Abstract

Abstract. This paper investigates the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in pedestrian wayfinding in two aspects. First, an experiment was conducted to understand whether an AR-based mobile platform improves finding the direction of a query destination compared to a paper map. A total of 54 participants were enrolled to represent each group, in which the task was to show the direction of a query point-of-interest (POI). The experiments were carried out at the Beytepe Campus of Hacettepe University. The results suggest that AR-based platform significantly improves the task completion time compared to a paper map. Second, an online questionnaire was conducted to understand the preference of participants in terms of visualising the distances of POIs on an AR-based platform. Four different methods were utilised which vary the colour and size of a POI depending on its distance to the user. The results suggest that the majority of the participants preferred visualising POIs with the same colour but with different sizes depending on their distance to the user. This finding adds further support to the default visualisation adopted in Mapbox, the technology that was used to develop the AR-based platform.