Indoor Navigation and the Role of MapsGeorg Gartner, Technische Universität Wien, Department of Geodesy and GeoinformationAs long as people need to decide where to go and how to get there, navigation will remain one of the fundamental problems in human cognition, wayfinding and geospatial research. Over the past several decades, navigation applications have increasingly conquered the world with online mapping services, car navigation systems and ubiquitous smartphone distribution. Lately, more and more Location-Based Services and mobile applications play a crucial role in our daily life as these help positioning, wayfinding and sharing of information. Currently, outdoor car navigation implementations are quite well-advanced and mature. Indoor navigation applications on the other hand have so far proven more challenging, even though the last decade showed significant progress in for example improved indoor localization techniques, standardization of indoor models and public indoor data gathering efforts. In this contribution several concepts for indoor navigation services are discussed and some developments towards deriving indoor landmarks and appropriate cartographic models highlighted.
Deemphasising Dead-ends: Navigation in Today's Dendritic CitiesNate Wessel, University of TorontoAlgorithmic detection of dead-ends and highly indirect streets could help cartographers reduce visual noise in transport maps, without resort to generalization techniques that simplify data or remove it entirely. In this presentation, I'll discuss algorithms for detecting dead-ends and apply them to a sample of regions, using OpenStreetMap data. I'll attempt to show how the resulting classification can be used to reduce visual noise and make maps easier for the eye to navigate. Preliminary results show that dead-ends make up between 12% and 45% of all streets and/or paths in my broad sample of regions, and can depend in varying degrees on the chosen transport mode for which the network is constructed. The proposed technique then has special relevance for mode-specific transport maps or maps for users with unique access constraints.
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Virtual Reality and Mapping: An Introduction to MatterportDerek Tonn, mapformation, LLC
The long-rumored arrival of virtual reality, in a commercially-viable sense, seems to finally be here. And its impacts upon map creation and wayfinding could be profound. No longer forcing end users of the wayfinding resources we develop (of which map illustration is but one) to understand the world in the one way we've visually presented it to them, virtual reality solutions are marrying planimetric and oblique/pictorial illustration with panoramic photography and the ability to freely move within a place. This session will introduce attendees to one VR-compatible solution I've become intimately familiar with over the past eighteen months: Matterport (https://matterport.com/try/). I will also share examples of how our mapping firm has been utilizing the technology.
