Wayfinding signs play an important role in guiding users to navigate in a virtual environment and in helping pedestrians to find their ways in a real-world architectural site. Conventionally, the wayfinding design of a virtual environment is created manually, so as the wayfinding design of a real-world architectural site. The many possible navigation scenarios, as well as the interplay between signs and human navigation, can make the manual design process overwhelming and non-trivial. As a result, creating a wayfinding design for a typical layout can take months to several years. In this paper, we introduce the Way to Go! approach for automatically generating a wayfinding design for a given layout. The designer simply has to specify some navigation scenarios; our approach will automatically generate an optimized wayfinding design with signs properly placed considering human agents' visibility and possibility of making mistakes during a navigation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating wayfinding designs for different layouts such as a train station, a downtown and a canyon. We evaluate our results by comparing different wayfinding designs and show that our optimized wayfinding design can guide pedestrians to their destinations effectively and efficiently. Our approach can also help the designer visualize the accessibility of a destination from different locations, and correct any "blind zone" with additional signs.
Wayfinding Map Generation. In computer graphics, there are interesting approaches for automatically generating tourist brochures @cite_56 and destination maps @cite_62 . Though these maps are intended for real-world navigation use, they could potentially be used to assist navigation in virtual environments. Given a map and some desired destinations, these approaches select a subset of roads to reach the destinations, and visualize the important routing instructions on a generated map which is intuitive to use. Our approach is inspired by these approaches, but focuses on optimizing the placement of wayfinding signs in the layout so as to guide pedestrians to reach their destinations easily. Combining automatically generated maps with the wayfinding signs generated by our approach can potentially provide users with effective wayfinding aids to navigate smoothly in virtual environments.
@cite_62 @cite_56
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We present a novel framework for the automatic generation of tourist brochures that include routing instructions and additional information presented in the form of so-called detail lenses. The first contribution of this paper is the automatic creation of layouts for the brochures. Our approach is based on the minimization of an energy function that combines multiple goals: positioning of the lenses as close as possible to the corresponding region shown in an overview map, keeping the number of lenses low, and an efficient numbering of the lenses. The second contribution is a route-aware simplification of the graph of streets used for traveling between the points of interest POIs. This is done by reducing the graph consisting of all shortest paths through the minimization of an energy function. The output is a subset of street segments that enable traveling between all the POIs without considerable detours, while at the same time guaranteeing a clutter-free visualization. Navigation services communicate optimal routes to users by providing sequences of instructions for these routes. Each single instruction guides the wayfinder from one decision point to the next. The instructions are based on geometric data from the street network, which is typically the only dataset available. This paper addresses the question of enriching such wayfinding instructions with local landmarks. We propose measures to formally specify the landmark saliency of a feature. Values for these measures are subject to hypothesis tests in order to define and extract landmarks from datasets. The extracted landmarks are then integrated in the wayfinding instructions. A concrete example from the city of Vienna demonstrates the applicability and usefulness of the method. In this paper I examine processes involved in place recognition and wayfinding in the context of spatial knowledge acquisition generally. Recognizing places is seen to be of vital importance in developing a declarative base: wayfinding is viewed as the most common means of acquiring place knowledge. Characteristics of place recognition are examined along with discussion of errors in place cognition and the role that spatial familiarity plays in attaching importance weights to distinguish primary nodes (anchor points) from other places. Wayfinding is characterized as route knowledge acquired via procedural rules. Parameters of wayfinding are discussed in reference to navigation in familiar and unfamiliar environments. The expression of wayfinding in terms of computational process models is examined, and the future role of geographic information systems in such modelling is explored in the penultimate section. In this paper we tackle the problem of generating natural route descriptions on the basis of input obtained from a commercially available way-finding system. Our framework and architecture incorporates the use of generic natural language generation techniques. Through examples we demonstrate that it is possible to bridge the gap between underlying representation and natural sounding descriptions. The work presented contributes both to the area of natural language generation and to the improvement of way-finding system interfaces.