Satellite Navigation and Geospatial Awareness: Long-Term Effects of Using Navigation Tools on Wayfinding and Spatial Orientation

This article examined long-term effects of using navigation tools on wayfinding and spatial orientation, through a survey analysis of the experience of using navigation tools and spatial aptitudes, and a behavioral experiment of real-world navigation. Experience of tool use was measured in terms of regular use (time length and frequency) and accumulated experience (time length multiplied by frequency). The survey analysis showed that frequent users of pedestrian navigation systems tended to be low on sense of direction and mental rotation. In contrast, longtime users of maps tended to be high on sense of direction and favor survey navigation strategies. The behavioral experiment showed that people who had more accumulated experience of using in-car navigation systems traveled less efficiently and learned the configurations of traveled routes less accurately with a mobile tool and a paper map. The analysis of long-term effects through structural equation modeling showed that spatial aptitudes and accumulated experience of tool use independently affect wayfinding and spatial orientation and that the negative effects of accumulated experience were larger than the positive effects of spatial aptitudes. The results and implications are discussed in relation to existing studies of short-term effects and spatial thinking.     

AffectRoute – considering people’s affective responses to environments for enhancing route-planning services

Humans perceive and evaluate environments affectively. Some places are experienced as unsafe, while some others as attractive and interesting. These affective responses to environments influence people’s daily behavior and decision-making in space, e.g., choosing which route to take, or which place to visit. In this article, we report on a methodology of using people’s affective responses to environments for enhancing computer-based route planning. More specifically, we explore a crowdsourcing approach to model and collect people’s affective responses to environments; an Affect-Space-Model and a mobile application are developed to facilitate this crowdsourcing approach; a routing algorithm (named AffectRoute) is then proposed to aggregate and integrate the collected data for automatic route planning. Evaluation with human participants shows that the routes generated by considering people’s affective responses to environments are significantly preferred over the conventional shortest ones, which are employed in car navigation systems and many online route planners. In conclusion, considering people’s affective responses to environments contributes to the improvement of automatic route planning. The proposed method can be integrated into existing route-planning services (e.g., location-based services) to provide users with more satisfying routing results.     

层次空间推理的机制及其在路径寻找方面的应用

人类对所处的客观世界的认识,具有很明显的空间层次特征,每一层次包含了解决特定问题的必要信息,而层次空间推理是人类在解决具有空间特征问题时常采用的一种方法。本文在探讨了层次空间推理的定义、一般性框架的基础上,重点描述了它在道路网络的路径寻找中的应用。     

面向微地图的地标提取方法及个性化寻路应用

地标在空间信息传输中具有重要作用,微地图为用户制作及传播地图内容提供平台。为提取符合人们空间认知的微地图地标,本文提出了一种由用户生成内容来提取地标的方法。① 计算公众认知度、城市中心度、特征属性值3个指标;② 利用熵值法确定各指标的权重,依据地标显著度差异分层获取地标,建立服务于微地图用户的地标集;③ 在用户制作及传播微地图的过程中,收集由用户生成的地标,丰富地标库,实现地标的二次传播,达到由用户生成内容提取地标的目的。实验选择兰州市安宁区的POI数据计算地标显著度,提取不同层次的地标,实验结果创建了服务于微地图用户的各层地标集,实例化利用地标连线完成寻路,绘制出满足用户不同需求的个性化路线。本研究应用于日常寻路,为微地图的快速绘制和将地标纳入导航系统提供参考,提高寻路效率。     

A comparative analysis of routes generated by Web Mapping APIs

Web Mapping APIs (WMAs), such as Google Maps API, are widely used by researchers across different fields to develop geospatial Web applications. Among maps and map functionalities provided through WMAs, route and direction are prominent and commonly available. Given that each WMA uses a different map database and a different set of assumptions, the routes they generate, for the same pairs of origin and destination addresses, are different. Considering the current void in literature on WMAs and the routes they generate, in this paper, select common WMAs are compared and analyzed based on their routing techniques. The results of these comparisons will benefit researchers by helping them better understand the behavior of WMAs in producing routes, which in turn can be used for selecting suitable WMAs for research projects or developing applications (such as navigation and location-based services). The process in which routes are evaluated can also be used as a guideline to help researchers explore behavior of WMAs in generating routes.     

Ad hoc shared‐ride trip planning by mobile geosensor networks

Recent developments in miniaturization of computing devices, in location‐sensing technology and in ubiquitous short‐range wireless networks enable new types of social behaviour. This paper investigates one novel application of these technologies, ad hoc inner‐urban shared‐ride trip planning: Transportation clients such as pedestrians are seeking ad hoc shared rides from transportation hosts such as private automobiles, buses, taxi cabs or trains. While centralized trip planners are challenged by assigning clients and hosts in an ad hoc manner, in particular for non‐scheduled hosts, we consider the transportation network as a mobile geosensor network of agents that interact locally by short‐range communication and heuristic wayfinding strategies. This approach is not only fully scalable; we can also demonstrate that with short‐range communication, and hence, incomplete transportation network knowledge a system still can deliver near‐to‐optimal trips.     

Exploring differences of visual attention in pedestrian navigation when using 2D maps and 3D geo-browsers

ABSTRACT

Despite the now-ubiquitous two-dimensional (2D) electronic maps, three-dimensional (3D) globe viewers, or 3D geo-browsers such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind have gained much attention. However, the effect of such interactive 3D geo-browsers on spatial knowledge acquisition and decision-making is not well known. This study aims to explore the potential benefits of using interactive 3D geo-browsers in three processes of pedestrian navigation (self-localization, spatial knowledge acquisition, and decision-making) in digital environments. We employed eye tracking to show differences of visual attention in pedestrian navigation between a 2D map (Google Map) and a 3D geo-browser (Google Earth). The results indicated that benefits and drawbacks of 3D representations are task dependent. Participants using the 3D geo-browser had an extensively visual search resulting in significantly longer response time than the 2D participants for spatial knowledge acquisition, whereas 3D users performed a more efficient visual search and resulted in a better navigation performance at complex decision points. We speculate that the inefficient knowledge acquisition when using the 3D geo-browser was most probably due to information overload and obstructed views. Landmarks in photorealistic 3D models assisted recall of spatial knowledge from mental maps, which contributed to efficient decision-making at a complex turning point. These empirical results can be helpful to improve the usability of pedestrian navigation systems.     

An Indoor Routing Algorithm for the Blind: Development and Comparison to a Routing Algorithm for the Sighted

This paper presents a prototypical implementation of a non‐network‐based indoor routing algorithm for the sighted and the blind. The spatial abilities of the visually impaired are discussed. Former approaches of outdoor navigation systems for the blind are analyzed and deemed inappropriate for the purpose of modeling indoor navigation. The proposed routing algorithm for the blind calculates routes based on physical characteristics of traveling with a long cane. The algorithm distinguishes between clues, landmarks, obstacles, and hazards along the feasible paths and selects the optimal route by trading off distance and the number of landmarks and clues along a route. Subsequently, the routes for the blind are compared to routes calculated by the routing algorithm for the sighted. The paper asserts that the proposed indoor routing algorithm leads to more suitable routes for the blind.     

基于道路网络知识的启发式层次路径寻找算法

基于道路网络的知识，探讨了定义一个层次拓扑来帮助路径寻找及如何确定层次之间转换的入／出结点，并结合启发式技术来提高路径计算性能的路径寻找算法。实验表明，该方法不仅可以减少计算所需要的时间和空间，也会产生一个符合人类思维特点的解。     

Collaborative personalized multi‐criteria wayfinding for wheelchair users in outdoors

While finding the optimal route for users with physical disabilities and personalizing routes for each user, on the one hand, and collaborative wayfinding, on the other hand, have been addressed in the pedestrian navigation systems literature, there has not been much research on combining the two activities. The problem associated with wayfinding approaches solely based on information about network segments and personal preferences is that the information about segments in the database may not, correctly and/or adequately address user preferences. The problem associated with wayfinding approaches solely based on the ratings given to routes by wheelchair users is the lack of rates (or scores) for all possible routes between all possible origin‐destination pairs in the network. This article discusses an approach to combine these two approaches for wayfinding to augment each other's shortcomings. To evaluate the personalized wayfinding approach, we utilize a route index, called a comparison index. The results show that with a P‐value of 9%, the routes obtained from our approach are more accessible than the routes obtained from another approach developed in another study. To evaluate the collaborative wayfinding approach, a Monte Carlo simulation was conducted which reflects the updates in routes as users' feedbacks become available.