Empirical evaluation of the pedestrian navigation method for easy wayfinding

It was reported that users of pedestrian navigation guidance sometimes feel anxiety because of “discrepancy” between the current and displayed location and “mismatch” between the landmarks on a map and in real situations. In order to afford comfort to the users, a route planning algorithm is proposed in this project, which weighs the user's difficulty of locating own current position as well as the total physical distance of courses. Valuation functions were proposed to estimate the effectiveness of various landmarks. An experimental study was conducted in real situation using a prototype system to confirm limits of the ability and acquire ideas for further improvement of the method. The result shows the limits and defects of the model were confirmed. Several policies for the modification of the model were decided based on the results of the experiment.