360° panoramic overviews for location-based services

  • Authors:

  • Alessandro Mulloni;Hartmut Seichter;Andreas Dünser;Patrick Baudisch;Dieter Schmalstieg

  • Affiliations:

  • Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria;Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria;HIT Lab NZ, Christchurch, New Zealand;Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany;Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We investigate 360° panoramas as overviews to support users in the task of locating objects in the surrounding environment. Panoramas are typically visualized as rectangular photographs, but this does not provide clear cues for physical directions in the environment. In this paper, we conduct a series of studies with three different shapes: Frontal, Top-Down and Bird's Eye; the last two shapes are chosen because they provide a clearer representation of the spatial mapping between panorama and environment. Our results show that good readability of the panorama is most important and that a clear representation of the spatial mapping plays a secondary role. This paper is the first to provide understanding on how users exploit 360° panoramic over-views to locate objects in the surrounding environment and how different design factors can affect user performance.