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B. Mazurkiewicz, M. Kattenbeck, I. Giannopoulos:
"Navigating Your Way! Increasing the Freedom of Choice During Wayfinding";
Talk: 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021), Poznan, Polen; 2021-09-27 - 2021-09-30; in: "11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021)", K Janowicz, J. Verstegen (ed.); Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, II / Dagstuhl (2021), ISBN: 978-3-95977-208-2; Paper ID 9, 16 pages.

Using navigation assistance systems has become widespread and scholars have tried to mitigate potentially adverse effects on spatial cognition these systems may have due to the division of attention they require. In order to nudge the user to engage more with the environment, we propose a novel navigation paradigm called Free Choice Navigation balancing the number of free choices, route length and number of instructions given. We test the viability of this approach by means of an agent-based simulation for three different cities. Environmental spatial abilities and spatial confidence are the two most important modeled features of our agents. Our results are very promising: Agents could decide freely at more than 50% of all junctions. More than 90% of the agents reached their destination within an average distance of about 125% shortest path length.

Using navigation assistance systems has become widespread and scholars have tried to mitigate potentially adverse effects on spatial cognition these systems may have due to the division of attention they require. In order to nudge the user to engage more with the environment, we propose a novel navigation paradigm called Free Choice Navigation balancing the number of free choices, route length and number of instructions given. We test the viability of this approach by means of an agent-based simulation for three different cities. Environmental spatial abilities and spatial confidence are the two most important modeled features of our agents. Our results are very promising: Agents could decide freely at more than 50% of all junctions. More than 90% of the agents reached their destination within an average distance of about 125% shortest path length.

Agent-based Simulation, Wayfinding, Free Choice Navigation

http://dx.doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.II.9