A natural wayfinding exploiting photos in pedestrian navigation systems

  • Authors:

  • Ashweeni Kumar Beeharee;Anthony Steed

  • Affiliations:

  • University College London, London, United Kingdom;University College London, London, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The increasing power and ubiquity of mobile phones mean that a visitor to a city now carries with them a device capable of giving quite detailed guiding and routing information. Whilst there has been a lot of studies of text and map based guiding applications for mobile devices, in this paper we want to propose and give an initial exploratory study of a guiding system that utilises photographs. These photographs are not explicitly taken with the intention of using them subsequently for giving route directions; rather they are extracted from existing geo-tagged photo collections from mobile phones. A user of our system sees a route description as text and a map that refers to a series of photographs. The main contribution of this paper is in demonstrating this concept and testing it in an exploratory between-subjects experiment. The experiment shows that presenting the right photographs certainly can help with particular types of routing instruction for users not familiar with an area. For example, in unusual situation where the user has to walk through a specific gate or path, photographs provide information and reassurance about the navigation decision.