Choose your own route – supporting pedestrian navigation without restricting the user to a predefined route

ABSTRACT

State-of-the-art mobile pedestrian navigation systems often employ GPS or other positioning methods for continuous tracking of users, and thus provide them with in-situ turn-by-turn route guidance along a desired route. However, studies have shown that user experience and acquisition of spatial knowledge decrease due to the “blind” following of such turn-by-turn navigation systems. This paper proposes a novel interface concept for mobile pedestrian navigation systems that provide navigation guidance without restricting the users to a predefined route. Specifically, the proposed novel user interface was based on the concept of the Potential Route Area (PRA), which defines a dynamic area consisting of all potential routes not longer than a certain detour the user is willing to accept. Within that area, the user can freely choose his/her own route and alter it anytime, and can still arrive at the destination within the desired detour tolerance. As a proof of concept, the proposed PRA-based system was then tested against a conventional turn-by-turn navigation system, represented by Google Maps, in a real-world navigation experiment, which revealed that the acquisition of spatial knowledge and user experience were substantially improved when using the PRA-based system. This can be explained by the fact that the PRA-based system provides its users with more freedom in choosing their own route.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedestrian navigation
• potential route area
• spatial knowledge acquisition
• user experience
• location based services
• navigation systems

Acknowledgments

This work was in part supported by the University Research Priority Program `Dynamics of Healthy Aging’ of the University of Zurich, who kindly lent out their mobile devices. The authors also would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments.

Author contributions

This paper is based on the Master Thesis of Thomas Mathis (TM), supervised by Haosheng Huang (HH). HH and TM conceptualized the work. Robert Weibel, as the head of the research unit, oversaw this work, and provided comments to further improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The data and codes that support the findings of this study are available at https://figshare.com/s/6de49ce1f1ba34e375c1.