Hierarchical route maps for efficient navigation

  • Authors:
  • Fangzhou Wang;Yang Li;Daisuke Sakamoto;Takeo Igarashi

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan;Google Research, Mountain View, CA, USA;The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan;The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

One of the difficulties with standard route maps is accessing to multi-scale routing information. The user needs to display maps in both a large scale to see details and a small scale to see an overview, but this requires tedious interaction such as zooming in and out. We propose to use a hierarchical structure for a route map, called a "Route Tree", to address this problem, and describe an algorithm to automatically construct such a structure. A Route Tree is a hierarchical grouping of all small route segments to allow quick access to meaningful large and small-scale views. We propose two Route Tree applications, "RouteZoom" for interactive map browsing and "TreePrint" for route information printing, to show the applicability and usability of the structure. We conducted a preliminary user study on RouteZoom, and the results showed that RouteZoom significantly lowers the interaction cost for obtaining information from a map compared to a traditional interactive map.