Adaptive Mobile Indoor Route Guidance, The Next Big Step

Abstract

Not all those who wander are lost… but when you are lost, there is a high chance that you are inside a building as we spend 90% of our time indoors. As opposed to outdoors, mobile indoor route guidance is not yet common practice, while the indoor environment can be far more complex than the outdoor one. As indoor navigation can be very challenging, we need supportive navigation systems that can ease the process. To this end, adaptive mobile indoor route guidance systems are being developed, which adapt the type of route instruction to the building configuration. This way, the right amount of information is provided at the right time and place. This work studies this type of smart route communication, and more specifically, its influence on the user. An online survey, a field experiment and a VR experiment were conducted to find out how building configuration can be quantified by the space syntax theory, which route instruction types should be used at which decision points and how this affects the performance, cognitive map, cognitive load and perception of the users. Prototypes were developed and eye tracking and position tracking were used to build the bridge between indoor route guidance technologies in smart buildings on the one hand, and the users of those smart buildings on the other hand. The results of this research can be translated into practical guidelines or implications for the design of adaptive mobile indoor route guidance systems, because this work has shown this is the way to go.