Environmental matching with limited displays

It is argued that to produce an informative spatial display on small devices one should focus on extracting distinctive features of the physical environment. These features can be communicated selectively to the user on small displays. By considering spatial, semantic, and visual information sources, one can generate cognitively adequate directions that foster spatial awareness, while limiting computational resources. This paper describes the issues involved in selecting appropriate elements within the cognitive collage of environmental spaces to generate such displays

Many to many mobile maps

The rapid development of mobile computing devices along with a variety of Web 2.0 social networking tools has led to a dramatic change in the way maps and other spatial displays are utilized. The evolution from stand-alone desktop GIS to the interactive, mobile devices, in which information from one or more sources and is sent to one or more sinks, is discussed. The result is access to real-time information, which is generated from both traditional sources, social networks, and other specialized geowikis. Both the benefits of many to many mobile maps and the emergence of new problems, such as understanding the needs of the user and providing appropriate context, are discussed

Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts

Route directions research has mostly focused on urban space so far, highlighting human concepts of street networks based on a range of recurring elements such as route segments, decision points, landmarks and actions. We explored the way route directions reflect the features of space and activity in the context of mountaineering. Alpine route directions are only rarely segmented through decision points related to reorientation; instead, segmentation is based on changing topography. Segments are described with various degrees of detail, depending on difficulty. For landmark description, direction givers refer to properties such as type of surface, dimension, colour of landscape features; terrain properties (such as snow) can also serve as landmarks. Action descriptions reflect the geometrical conceptualization of landscape features and dimensionality of space. Further, they are very rich in the semantics of manner of motion

Enriching spatial knowledge through a multiattribute locational system

Research has demonstrated that current navigation systems, while useful as a wayfinding tool, do not support the acquisition of spatial knowledge of the environment. In contrast to portable navigation devices, participants in this study learned about the location of lesser known campus libraries through a desktop system, which presented yoked images, maps and verbal directions to the participants. Information included not only the location of the building that housed the library, but also internal directions within the building to the library itself. The results showed that confidence to find the library by memory was notably improved by use of the system. Finally, the role of images was examined by selectively removing images from a random subset of the libraries, which resulted in marked decrease in confidence. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg