Skip to content
Woman hand using smart phone on top of mountain with navigator location point. Amazing Carpathians landscape background banner panorama with hills, clouds and forest at dawn

Wayfinding Through Orientation

About

Wayfinding is a task that we manage every day while going to work or on vacation. Although wayfinding research has gone through tremendous development, it suffers from fundamental shortcomings: State-of-the art wayfinding research still adheres to the principles of turn-by-turn navigation. This project investigates a new wayfinding paradigm “Wayfinding Through Orientation” that supports the acquisition of spatial knowledge and cognitive mapping for advancing the user’s orientation.

Project Goals

Our project goals are achieved through four objectives:
  • We develop a scientific understanding of orientation in wayfinding through empirically analyzing what kind of information induces orientation in humans.
  • We generate orientation information automatically. Orientation information is different to spatial data stored in geographic information systems, because it does not have a consistent level of generalization, it is schematized and it refers to vernacular, vague places not included in traditional maps.
  • New means of communication are developed to integrate orientation instructions into route directions. New maps are required to account for the characteristics of orientation information.
  • To evaluate orientation wayfinding, we cannot apply traditional measures such as travel time, but develop new methods to determine the effect of orientation wayfinding on peoples’ ability to solve wayfinding tasks that require orientation and cognitive mapping.

At a glance:

Funding Period 1:

07/2014 – 06/2017
DFG

Funding Period 2:

09/2015 – 03/2021
ERC Starting Researcher Grant

Publications

2014

Visualising distant off-screen landmarks on mobile devices to support spatial orientation

Li, R.; Korda, A.; Radtke, M.; Schwering, A.

Journal of Location Based Services

2013

2016

What is Orientation?

Krukar J, Schwering A

Visualizing salient features in spatial descriptions

Anacta,VJA, Krukar,J, Humayun,MI,Schwering,A

2017

Cognitively Sustainable Built Environments

Krukar Jakub

Indoor Wayfinding: Interview with Christoph Hölscher and Ruth Conroy Dalton

Krukar J, Hölscher C, Conroy Dalton R

Künstliche Intelligenz

Landmark-Based Navigation in Cognitive Systems

Krukar J, Schwering A, Anacta VJ

Künstliche Intelligenz

Wayfinding Through Orientation

Schwering, A. Krukar, J. Li, R. Anacta, V. J. Fuest, S.

Spatial Cognition and Computation

Perspectives in externalizations of mental spatial representations

Löwen Heinrich, Schwering Angela, Krukar Jakub, Winter Stephan

Springer International Publishing

Rethinking Wayfinding Support Systems—Introduction

Krukar J, Schwering A, Löwen H, De Lima Galvao M, Anacta VJ

Springer International Publishing

2018

Spatial distribution of local landmarks in route-based sketch maps

A. Anacta Vanessa Joy, Li Rui, Löwen Heinrich, De Lima Galvao Marcelo, Schwering Angela

How should Orientation Maps look like?

Löwen Heinrich, Krukar Jakub, Schwering Angela

Towards automatically generating maps for wayfinding and orientation

Löwen Heinrich, Krukar Jakub, Schwering Angela

Distinguishing Sketch Map Types: A Flexible Feature-Based Classification

Krukar J, Münzer S, Lörch L, Anacta VJ, Fuest S, Schwering A

Springer International Publishing

2020

An algorithm for the selection of route dependent orientation information

Löwen Heinrich, Schwering Angela

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Route schematization with landmarks

Galvão Marcelo, Krukar Jakub, Nöllenburg Martin, Schwering Angela

Journal of Spatial Information Science

2019

Functional Scales in Assisted Wayfinding

Löwen H, Krukar J, Schwering A

Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik

Wayfinding Through Orientation: Schematizing Landmark, Route and Survey Information in a Single Map

Schwering Angela, Galvão Marcelo, Löwen Heinrich, Krukar Jakub, Schick Wiebke

Route Schematization With Polygonal Landmarks

Galvão M, Krukar J, Nöllenburg M, Schwering A

Spatial Learning with Orientation Maps: The Influence of Different Environmental Features on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition

Löwen Heinrich, Krukar Jakub, Schwering Angela

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information

2021

Evaluating schematic route maps in wayfinding tasks for in-car navigation

Galvão M, Krukar J, Schwering A

Cartography and Geographic Information Science

2023

Route effects in city-based survey knowledge estimates

Krukar J.; Navas Medrano S.; Schwering A.

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

Cognitive Processing

Schematizing car routes with their surrounding street network

Galvão M.L.; Krukar J.; Schwering A.

Taylor and Francis Ltd.

Cartography and Geographic Information Science