Every day, humans move through space and time. Traditionally, performance in navigation tasks has been assessed primarily by measuring the time or distance required to reach a destination. With the use of mobile sensors such as GPS and digital compasses, it is now possible to record spatio-temporal movement data in great detail and even capture contextual information about the surrounding environment. However, such spatio-temporal trajectories alone do not provide direct insights into actual movement behaviour. For example: does a decrease in speed indicate disorientation, or is it simply a reaction to environmental factors? Conversely, does high speed reflect confidence in wayfinding?

In this thesis, you will investigate spatial trajectories of participants performing wayfinding tasks. Your objectives will be to identify suitable measures for analysing and interpreting trajectories – e.g. how to determine wayfinding confidence and getting lost based on speed, viewing direction and trajectory – , to develop algorithms that extract relevant information from trajectory data, and to test your approach using existing datasets.

You will have access to trajectories collected during wayfinding studies with our research software GeoGami (www.geogami.org respectively https://app.geogami.ifgi.de/)

Measures for wayfinding performance measures (not technology supported):

Hölscher et al (2006): Up the down staircase: Wayfinding strategies in multi-level buildings, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2006.09.002

Ruddle et al (2006): Three Levels of Metric for Evaluating Wayfinding, https://doi.org/10.1162/pres.15.6.637