Reassessing Underlying Spatial Relations in Pedestrian Navigation

Abstract

This chapter assesses underlying spatial relations for pedestrian wayfinding by examining navigational directions given in both forms of sketch maps and verbal descriptions. An experiment was conducted to investigate characteristics of navigational directions provided by participants in the form of sketch maps and verbal descriptions. The authors were specifically interested in the landmarks and spatial relationships such as route topology, linear order relation, and relative orientation extracted from the navigational directions. A new ontological approach to sketch and verbal interpretations was adopted for spatial analysis. The results pointed to the advantage of including sketch components into pedestrian navigation systems over solely turn-by-turn instructions. In addition, the results showed the differences between visual and verbal directions, which suggest the necessity of having different levels of directions for giving specific types of navigational instructions.