This paper presents results from a desktop experiment in which the participants’ route selection behavior in an unknown street network is investigated. The participants were presented with a series of intersections in a virtual urban desktop environment in field view. Given the task to reach a distant wayfinding target that could be seen in the background, participants then had to state their p...

This paper aims to evaluate what effect applying residents’ urban image to virtual city design (a real time virtual model of an actual city) has on wayfinding performance during ‘flying-based’ navigation mode. Two experiments were conducted to compare two virtual city designs using the virtual model of Tel Aviv city. One design included highlighted urban elements from the residents’ urban image...

The intention of this article is to create a link between human spatial cognition research and architectural design. We conducted an empirical study with human subjects in a complex multi-level building and compared thinking aloud protocols and performance measures of experienced and inexperienced participants in different wayfinding tasks. Three specific strategies for navigation in multilevel...

This study assesses gender differences in wayfinding in environments with global or local landmarks by analyzing both overall and fine-grained measures of performance. Both female and male participants were required to locate targets in grid-like virtual environments with local or global landmarks. Interestingly, the results of the two overall measures did not converge: although females spent m...

Wayfinding difficulties in healthcare facilities have been shown to increase anxiety among patients and visitors, reduce staff operational efficiency, costs. There is evidence that wayfinding-oriented interior design features can mitigate these problems, but the robust evaluation of wayfinding strategies hindered by unique nature each building expense testing different navigational aids. The cu...

This chapter reviews a model of measuring the salience of a specific class of spatial features—façades of buildings—for adaptation to abilities and preferences of user groups of wayfinding services. The model was intentionally designed to be open for such adaptations, and we will report on ways, experiences, and limitations of doing so. We will prove the hypothesis that focalization, i.e., adap...

Current wayfinding simulation systems take little account of the architectural information in the built environment, which indicates that, there is an underestimation of the influence of architectural information on individual’s wayfinding behaviour. In presented studies, a vision-based simulation system is introduced. In this simulation system, an agent is designed to navigate through virtual ...

Objective: This paper provides an overview of the available literature on architectural wayfinding design for people with dementia in nursing homes. The results were to be summarized and substantiated through an interdisciplinary interpretation, taking into account changes in the orientation process of people with dementia. Background: Spatial disorientation and declining wayfinding abilities a...

We present a novel approach to natural language generation (NLG) that applies hierarchical reinforcement learning to text generation in the wayfinding domain. Our approach aims to optimise the integration of NLG tasks that are inherently different in nature, such as decisions of content selection, text structure, user modelling, referring expression generation (REG), and surface realisation. It...