You Are Not Lost — You Are Somewhere Here

We present the concept of route aware maps. Route aware maps are a specific form of map-based wayfinding assistance. These maps focus on the essential information for getting from an origin to a destination (the route), but provide enough additional information to allow for error recovery and a wayfinder’s global orientation within an environment. We believe that these maps are a promising approach to overcome two key problems of route-based wayfinding assistance: being lost due to unrecoverable navigation errors and lack of spatial learning due to the key-hole problem. Furthermore, we expect route aware maps to increase a wayfinder’s confidence in the wayfinding task, which in return is assumed to improve the navigation performance.