A System of Automatic Generation of Landmark-Based Pedestrian Navigation Instructions and Its Effectiveness for Wayfinding

Analysis of Spatial Landmarks for Seamless Urban Navigation of Visually Impaired People

“…Landmarks are actually rarely used in mainstream commercial systems due to the difficulty of getting updated data about them, and the ability to automatically select and integrate them in navigation devices. But a considerable number of recent works in the engineering sciences attempt to integrate landmarks into navigation assistant devices [11], by using spatial databases such as point of interest and GIS databases including road networks and cadastral maps [12], or dynamic sources such as web content, crowdsourcing data, and social networking websites [13]. These efforts are however focused on sighted people, and the issue could be even more delicate for visually impaired people if visual saliency is the primary quality used to recognize and use landmarks during navigation and wayfinding, and mostly if landmarks differed between sighted and visually impaired people.…”

It’s also about timing! When do pedestrians want to receive navigation instructions

“…Empirical evidence has been provided that the use of landmarks has a positive impact on wayfinding performance (see, e.g., Ross, May & Thompson, 2004;Tom & Denis, 2004) and that the absence of landmarks in an environment is compensated by an increased granularity in verbal humanto-human route instructions (see Hirtle, Richter, Srinivas & Firth, 2010). Research on incorporating landmarks (see Richter & Winter, 2014, for a thorough overview of the concept) in route instructions for wayfinding assistance systems has, consequently, become a predominant research topic, including modeling (see, e.g., Caduff & Timpf, 2008;Nothegger, Winter & Raubal, 2004;Nuhn & Timpf, 2017;Raubal & Winter, 2002;Winter, 2003), empirical assessment (see, e.g., Götze & Boye, 2016;Kattenbeck, 2017;Kattenbeck, Nuhn & Timpf, 2018;Quesnot & Roche, 2015) of salience and the automatic selection of landmarks (see, e.g., Duckham, Winter & Robinson, 2010;Lander, Herbig, Löchtefeld, Wiehr & Krüger, 2017;Lazem & Sheta, 2005;Rousell & Zipf, 2017;Wang & Ishikawa, 2018).…”

“…This lack of consideration also holds true for research on modalities and presentation of route instructions. Beyond the prevalent map-based approaches, research on modalities and presentation modes has primarily focused on their impact on wayfinding effectiveness and efficiency by studying, for example augmented photographs (see, e.g., Walther-Franks & Malaka, 2008;Wang & Ishikawa, 2018), audio (see, e.g., Holland, Morse & Gedenryd, 2002), augmented reality (see, e.g., Rehrl, Häusler, Leitinger & Bell, 2014), vibro-tactile signals (see, e.g., Giannopoulos, Kiefer & Raubal, 2015) or music (see, e.g., Hazzard, Benford & Burnett, 2014). In addition to that, the studies on the presentation of instructions have also considered the reduction of attentional load (see, e.g., Stähli, Giannopoulos & Raubal, 2020) and effect on spatial knowledge acquisition (see, e.g., Brügger, Richter & Fabrikant, 2018).…”

An alternative wayfinding map design for map illiterate tourists

“…Therefore, along stretches of road where there are few intersections with other roads, or intersections are so minor that they are unnamed (in the case of walkways), landmarks need to be included, even if they are not a point of interest, but used only to help the map user to understand their location. Wang and Ishikawa (2018) recommended that maps show landmarks at intermediate points along any path longer than 200 metres to allow selflocalisation.…”