Tactile wayfinder: a non-visual support system for wayfinding

ABSTRACT

Digital maps and route descriptions on a PDA have become very popular for navigation, not the least with the advent of the iPhone and its Google Maps application. A visual support for wayfinding, however, is not reasonable or even possible all the time. A pedestrian must pay attention to traffic on the street, a hiker should concentrate on the narrow trail, and a blind person relies on other modalities to find her way. To overcome these limitations, we developed a non-visual support for wayfinding that guides and keeps a mobile user en route by a tactile display. We designed a belt with vibrators that indicates directions and deviations from the path in an accurate and unobtrusive way. Our first user evaluation showed that on an open field without any landmarks the participants stayed well to given test routes and that wayfinding support is possible with our Tactile Wayfinder.

REFERENCES

• 1: D. Ahlers, D. Wichmann, and S. Boll. Gnss quality in pedestrian applications: A developer perspective, 2008.
• 2: I. Aslan and A. Krüger. An advanced pedestrian navigation system. In Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Mobile Systems(AIMS) at UbiComp, pages 15--19, 2004.
• 3: R. M. Downs and D. Stea. Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitve Mapping. Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 52rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022, US, 1977.
• 4: Jan B. F. Van Erp , Hendrik A. H. C. Van Veen , Chris Jansen , Trevor Dobbins, Waypoint navigation with a vibrotactile waist belt, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP), v.2 n.2, p.106-117, April 2005 [doi>10.1145/1060581.1060585]
• 5: R. G. Golledge, editor. Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Dec 1998.
• 6: S. Holland, D. R. Morse, and H. Gedenryd. Audiogps: Spatial audio navigation with a minimal attention interface. In Proceedings of Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices, volume 6, pages 253--259, London, UK, 2002. Springer-Verlag.
• 7: Humanware. Trekker. http://www.humanware.com/en-new\_zealand/products/gps/trekker, last visited 01.Feb.2008.
• 8: C. A. Lawton. Gender differences in way-finding strategies: Relationship to spatial ability and spatial anxiety. Sex Roles, 30(11--12):765--779, Jun 1994.
• 9: Sue Long , Rob Kooper , Gregory D. Abowd , Christopher G. Atkeson, Rapid prototyping of mobile context-aware applications: the Cyberguide case study, Proceedings of the 2nd annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.97-107, November 1996, Rye, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/236387.236412]
• 10: E. Platzer. Spatial Cognition Research: The Human Navigation Process and its Comparability in Complex Real and Virtual Envrionments. PhD thesis, Universität der Bundeswehr München, 2005.
• 11: G. Pospischil, H. Kunczier, and A. Kuchar. LoL@: a UMTS location based service. In International Symposion on 3rd Generation Infrastructure and Services, Athen, Greece, 2001.
• 12: J. L. Prestopnik and B. Roskos-Ewoldsen. The relations among wayfinding strategy use, sense of direction, sex, familiarity, and wayfinding ability. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20:177--191, 2000.
• 13: Enrico Rukzio , Albrecht Schmidt , Antonio Krüger, The rotating compass: a novel interaction technique for mobile navigation, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, OR, USA [doi>10.1145/1056808.1057016]
• 14: Sabine Timpf , Gary S. Volta , David W. Pollock , Max J. Egenhofer, A Conceptual Model of Wayfinding Using Multiple Levels of Abstraction, Proceedings of the International Conference GIS - From Space to Territory: Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning on Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space, p.348-367, September 21-23, 1992
• 15: K. Tsukada and M. Yasumrua. Activebelt: Belt-type wearable tactile display for directional navigation. In Proceedings of UbiComp2004, pages 384--399. Springer LNCS 3205, 2004.
• 16: B. Tversky. Cognitive maps, cognitive collages, and spatial mental models. In A. Frank and I. Campari, editors, Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Proceedings COSIT 1993, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 14--24. Springer Berlin - Heidelberg, 1993.
• 17: J. S. Zelek, S. Bromley, D. Asmar, and D. Thompson. A haptic glove as a tactile-vision sensory substitution for wayfinding. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 97(10):1--24, October 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.6 Methodology and Techniques

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
pedestrian navigation, tactile display, wayfinding