Sven Leitinger

Pedestrian navigation with augmented reality, voice and digital map: final results from an in situ field study assessing performance and user experience

This paper reports on a field study comparing navigation performance and user experience of voice, digital map and augmented reality (AR) interfaces for electronic assistance in the context of pedestrian navigation. The in situ study was conducted with two subsequent experiments in the city of Salzburg along a pre-defined route using a self-implemented smartphone application running on Apples iPhone 4. The study involved 48 participants aged between 22 and 66 years with different experiences in using smartphones and navigation systems. Navigation performance was measured on a micro-level including information on effectiveness (number and reasons of stops, global positioning system (GPS accuracy), efficiency (walking and task completion time, duration of stops) and satisfaction (NASA Task Load Index, System Usability Scale). A final questionnaire completed the study. Between the first and the second experiment, the application was adapted considering user feedback and the previous findings. Results show that in the context of GPS-enhanced pedestrian navigation, digital map and voice-only interfaces lead to significantly better navigation performance and user experience in comparison to AR interfaces. The study also reveals similar results for digital map and voice-only interfaces given that voice instructions are carefully composed. Results lead to the conclusion that AR is still suffering from usability and hardware issues leading to higher uncertainty of navigating persons. Best navigation performance and user experience can be achieved by combining digital maps and accurate voice instructions.

A Conceptual Model for Analyzing Contribution Patterns in the Context of VGI

The chapter proposes a conceptual model as foundation for analyzing user contributions in the context of VGI. The conceptual model is based on a set of action and domain concepts, which are combined to a task-model describing typical tasks of volunteered geographic information contribution. As a proof-of-concept, the model is applied to two sample data sets that are extracted from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) change history. OSM data samples provide a proof-of-concept concerning the applicability of the model for crowd activity analysis. The resulting “contribution graph”, which is a graph-like structure of linked editing actions, can be used as foundation for analyzing complex contribution patterns.

Comparing the effectiveness of GPS-enhanced voice guidance for pedestrians with metric- and landmark-based instruction sets

This paper reports on a field experiment comparing two different kinds of verbal turn instructions in the context of GPS-based pedestrian navigation. The experiment was conducted in the city of Salzburg with 20 participants. Both instruction sets were based on qualitative turn direction concepts. The first one was enhanced with metric distance information and the second one was enhanced with landmark-anchored directions gathered from participants of a previous field experiment. The results show that in context of GPS-enhanced pedestrian navigation both kinds of instruction sets lead to similar navigation performance. Results also demonstrate that effective voice-only guidance of pedestrians in unfamiliar environments at a minimal error rate and without stopping the walk is feasible. Although both kinds of instructions lead to similar navigation performance, participants clearly preferred landmark-enhanced instructions.

AffectRoute – considering people’s affective responses to environments for enhancing route-planning services

Humans perceive and evaluate environments affectively. Some places are experienced as unsafe, while some others as attractive and interesting. These affective responses to environments influence people’s daily behavior and decision-making in space, e.g., choosing which route to take, or which place to visit. In this article, we report on a methodology of using people’s affective responses to environments for enhancing computer-based route planning. More specifically, we explore a crowdsourcing approach to model and collect people’s affective responses to environments; an Affect-Space-Model and a mobile application are developed to facilitate this crowdsourcing approach; a routing algorithm (named AffectRoute) is then proposed to aggregate and integrate the collected data for automatic route planning. Evaluation with human participants shows that the routes generated by considering people’s affective responses to environments are significantly preferred over the conventional shortest ones, which are employed in car navigation systems and many online route planners. In conclusion, considering people’s affective responses to environments contributes to the improvement of automatic route planning. The proposed method can be integrated into existing route-planning services (e.g., location-based services) to provide users with more satisfying routing results.

An analysis of direction and motion concepts in verbal descriptions of route choices

This paper reports on a study analyzing verbal descriptions of route choices collected in the context of two in situ experiments in the cities of Salzburg and Vienna. In the study 7151 propositions from 20 participants describing route choices along four routes directly at decision points (100 decision points in total) are classified and compared to existing studies. Direction and motion concepts are extracted, semantically grouped and ranked by their overall occurrence frequency. A cross-classification of direction and motion concepts exposes frequently used combinations. The paper contributes to a more detailed understanding of situational spatial discourse (primarily in German) by participants being unfamiliar with a way-finding environment. Results contribute to cognitively-motivated spatial decision support systems, especially in the context of pedestrian navigation.

Assisting orientation and guidance for multimodal travelers in situations of modal change

Increasing the share of multimodal journeys are necessary for society to guarantee a high level of mobility given current growth rates. However, while car drivers are already assisted by advanced guidance and navigation facilities, continuous on-trip assistance for multimodal travelers is still in its infancies. Especially when it comes to situations of modal change, travelers get discouraged by increased complexity and missing information and guidance. Thus, our goal is to develop a palm-based personal travel companion for multimodal travelers. The work presented in this paper especially focuses on pedestrian orientation and guidance in complex public transport interchange buildings.

Smartphone-based information and navigation aids for public transport travellers

Digital navigation assistance on Smartphones has recently gained high attention due to capable mobile devices, off-board based navigation software and advancements in wireless network technologies. Mobile information and navigation aids can assist travellers in non-trivial navigation and orientation tasks in unknown geographical regions or transport systems. Whereas car navigation has reached a certain level of maturity, assistance for multimodal travellers especially in public transport networks is still in its infancies. Integration of mobile multimodal journey planning and navigation and guidance in complex public interchange facilities is not adequately addressed by existing systems. Thus, in this paper we propose a personal travel companion on Smartphones for assisting multimodal travellers. We focus on the topics mobile journey planning, pedestrian route calculation, navigation and guidance in public interchange buildings and seamless transition between indoor and outdoor positioning. Moreover the paper describes the prototypical implementation on Off-the-shelf Smartphones and evaluation results.

User Requirements for a Mobile Disaster Documentation System

According to a successful disaster management the analysis of the disaster is needed. For this purpose the documentation of the disaster is necessary. Up to now many studies deal with different aspects of mobile systems for the disaster management. They are developed for disaster management activities of public safety units, but there are no applications for the documentation process during and after a disaster. In this paper we describe an approach for a mobile disaster documentation system. The main focus lies on the user requirements of the different user groups. The disaster documentation focuses mostly on information about a disaster and possible activities undertaken by disaster and public safety experts. The documentation structure should use a common language based on a standard terminology. A standardized documentation structure would help to harmonize the information basis, accessibility, and better integration in spatial decision-making processes.