Wangshu Wang
Please Follow the Signs: Considering Existing Navigational Aids in Indoor Navigation Services

Navigating through large-scale public buildings presents unique challenges for individuals. Therefore, external representations of the environment, such as existing navigational aids (signs and floor plans) and mobile navigation services, have been designed to assist indoor wayfinding and offload cognition. Currently, these systems operate independently. Studies indicate that existing navigational aids, with their encoded spatial relations, can serve as semantic landmarks and facilitate spatial knowledge acquisition, whereas mobile navigation services impair spatial learning.

This dissertation aims to address the challenges of indoor wayfinding and spatial learning, by integrating existing navigational aids into navigation services. An explorative experiment involving human participants was conducted to clarify indoor human wayfinding behaviour and its influencing factors at decision points. The results provided a systematic overview of indoor wayfinding decision-making tactics, enriching the existing wayfinding theory and practically informing architecture design, building management, and indoor navigation system design.

Building upon these insights, a computational framework named ISIGNS (Indoor Sign InteGrated Navigation System) was proposed to integrate existing navigational aids into indoor navigation services, focusing on signs and their semantics. Implementing ISIGNS requires only a navigation graph and a sign dataset, which can be derived from most indoor spatial databases, making it highly applicable. An in-situ experiment evaluating ISIGNS with human participants demonstrated its potential for enriching navigation experiences and improving usability. Moreover, the proposed approach significantly enhanced human spatial learning, particularly in acquiring landmark and survey knowledge. By explicitly incorporating sign semantics, ISIGNS encourages attention allocation to the environment and leverages the semantic nature of signs, leading to improved spatial knowledge acquisition.

Overall, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of indoor human wayfinding behaviour, sheds light on the factors influencing decision-making, and provides insights into the effects of different environmental information sources on spatial knowledge acquisition. The proposed ISIGNS framework introduces an effective solution for integrating existing navigational aids into indoor navigation services, enhancing navigation experiences, and promoting spatial learning.