Effects of mobile map orientation and tactile feedback on navigation speed and situation awareness

Abstract

Mobile information systems aid first responders in their tasks. Support is often based on mobile maps. People have different preferences for map orientations (heading-up or north-up), but map orientations also have different advantages and disadvantages. In general north-up maps are good for building up situation awareness and heading-up maps are better for navigational tasks. Because of heavily loaded visual modalities, we expect that tactile waypoint information can enhance navigation speed and situation awareness. In this paper we describe an experiment conducted in a synthetic task environment, in which we examined the effect of heading-up and north-up displays on search and rescue performance of first responders, and if adding the tactile display improves performance.

Supporting map-based wayfinding with tactile cues

“…Since way finding based on survey knowledge (e.g., the paper map) relies on being spatially oriented [12] the in average shorter routes indicate that the participants had a better spatial orientation when provided with the tactile cue. This also supports the findings by Smets et al [16] where participants in a virtual world navigated more effectively with a vibrotactile directional cue of the destination. Nevertheless, the walking speed decreased significantly while the completion time was not significantly different with the tactile belt.…”

“…Tactile displays that convey spatial information for improving the sense of orientation [21,10,23] or the situation awareness [8,16] have been investigated for quite a while. Tactile belts, such as the ActiveBelt by Tsukada and Yasumura [18], consist of a number of tactors (e.g.…”

“…While the total completion time increased significantly, the absolute time (in seconds) being exposed was roughly the same. Smets et al [16] combined the use of a tactile vest for displaying the destination's direction with head-up and north-up maps. They conducted a study in a virtual environment, where the participants had to reach given places as fast as possible.…”

“…Other researchers (e.g. [16]) therefore choose a pulsing display where the pauses between stimulations are sufficient for the skin to regenerate to full sensitiveness. However, stimulating the skin with pulses means that the stimulation is more obtrusive, as the perception constantly changes.…”

A Tactile Compass for Eyes-Free Pedestrian Navigation

“…This kind of information presentation technique has successfully been used to "drag" people towards waypoints [28] while reducing the distraction at the same time [3,14]. With respect to map-based navigation it has been shown that cueing the general direction of the destination can improve the navigation performance and reduce the distraction [15,22]. Supporting map-based navigation is desirable, since turn-by-turn instructions may disengage users from the environment [9], lead to a worse understanding of the environments spatial layout [1], and are not necessarily more effective than maps [7].…”