Abstract
Current wayfinding research usually addresses the question of how people navigate,
orientate and how they can be supported in unfamiliar environments. This scenario is
important to understand the underlying concepts of wayfinding and to identify general
principles applicable in wayfinding assistance. However, in every day live we usually
perform wayfinding tasks in partial (not every place and path is known) familiar
environments (e.g., if we look for the address of a particular doctor, shop or agency).
Recently, as the location awareness of mobile devices constantly increases, people get
interested in analyzing location data to extract spatial user profiles for location based
services or diary applications. But only very few
contributions attack the question of how familiarity with an environment and its
mental representation can be captured, represented and used for wayfinding assistance
and, to the knowledge of the authors, no available wayfinding assistance
system is able to integrate previous personal environmental knowledge. All systems
implicitly assume the user to be completely unfamiliar with the present environment.
This assumption does not lead to wrong results, but it disregards cognitive and
representational benefits for the user. If a system knows about the “spatial signature”
(a unique set of places like a user's home, his work, his grocery, his cafés where he
meets his friends, the kindergarten of his kids, ...) it can use this previous knowledge
as a reference frame for personalized assistance. This spatial signature can be used as
a personalized configuration for navigation assistance systems, mixed reality
applications (like ubiquitous gaming), profile matching and scheduling applications.
Integrated in a mobile device, like a mobile phone, such an assistance system can
generate location sensitive route directions and maps based on the individual
reference frame: a user's meaningful places and paths between them.
Users
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