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 appr...

Wayfinding support is a basic and important location based service. Today, this kind of service is mostly provided by solidly installed, static means. Of these means maps ideally support wayfinding, as it is possible, for example, to use one map for many visitors with many different destinations. A special kind of maps––You-Are-Here maps––is especially suited if design and placement criteria ar...

This article considers the problem of spatial representation for animat navigation systems. It is proposed that the global navigation task, or wayfinding, is best supported by multiple interacting sub-systems, each of which builds its own partial representation of relevant world knowledge. Evidence from the study of animal navigation is reviewed to demonstrate that similar principles underlie t...

To achieve safe and independent mobility, people usually depend on published information, prior experience, the knowledge of others, and/or technology to navigate unfamiliar outdoor and indoor environments. Today, due to advances in various technologies, wayfinding and navigation systems and services are commonplace and are accessible on desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. However, despite the...

Developing effective urban planning approaches is a major challenge for outdoor and indoor environments. Wayfinding in unfamiliar indoor environments is a prime task which everyone would be encountered. The development of assistive technologies to aid wayfinding is hampered by the lack of reliable and cost-efficient methods providing location information in the environment. We have applied RFID...

There are many strategies for wayfinding strategies in the physical world and the World Wide Web (WWW). The decision processes of these strategies use various cues from the environment, such as topologic relations, information from other navigators, images of places, semantics of objects, and metric information. This paper discusses how the representation of the goal and the environment in the ...

Landmarks are crucial for human wayfinding. Their integration in wayfinding assistance systems is essential for generating cognitively ergonomic route directions. I present an approach to automatically determining references to different types of landmarks. This approach exploits the circular order of a decision point’s branches. It allows uniformly handling point landmarks as well as linear an...

Wayfinding models can be helpful in describing, understanding, and technologically supporting the processes involved in navigation. However, current models either lack a high degree of formalization, or they are not holistic and perceptually grounded, which impedes their use for cognitive engineering. In this paper, we propose a novel formalism that covers the core wayfinding processes, yet is ...

A significant difference exists between wayfinding support services available in outdoor and indoor locations. Users in outdoor locations can access services like Google Maps via a mobile phone and incar GPS, which allows them to examine unknown locations before arrival as well as receive assistance en-route. In contrast, there is relatively little digital wayfinding support for users in indoor...