Zhao Hantao, Thrash Tyler, Grossrieder Armin, Kapadia Mubbasir, Moussaïd Mehdi, Hölscher Christoph, Schinazi Victor R
Chair of Cognitive Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Mar 25;7(3):191523. doi: 10.1098/rsos.191523. eCollection 2020 Mar.
A carefully designed map can reduce pedestrians' cognitive load during wayfinding and may be an especially useful navigation aid in crowded public environments. In the present paper, we report three studies that investigated the effects of map complexity and crowd movement on wayfinding time, accuracy and hesitation using both online and laboratory-based networked virtual reality (VR) platforms. In the online study, we found that simple map designs led to shorter decision times and higher accuracy compared to complex map designs. In the networked VR set-up, we found that co-present participants made very few errors. In the final VR study, we replayed the traces of participants' avatars from the second study so that they indicated a different direction than the maps. In this scenario, we found an interaction between map design and crowd movement in terms of decision time and the distributions of locations at which participants hesitated. Together, these findings can help the designers of maps for public spaces account for the movements of real crowds.
精心设计的地图可以减轻行人在寻路过程中的认知负担，在拥挤的公共环境中可能是一种特别有用的导航辅助工具。在本文中，我们报告了三项研究，这些研究使用在线和基于实验室的网络虚拟现实（VR）平台，调查了地图复杂性和人群移动对寻路时间、准确性和犹豫程度的影响。在在线研究中，我们发现与复杂地图设计相比，简单地图设计导致决策时间更短、准确性更高。在网络VR设置中，我们发现共同在场的参与者犯的错误很少。在最后的VR研究中，我们重放了第二项研究中参与者化身的轨迹，使其指示的方向与地图不同。在这种情况下，我们发现在决策时间以及参与者犹豫的位置分布方面，地图设计和人群移动之间存在相互作用。这些发现共同可以帮助公共空间地图的设计者考虑真实人群的移动情况。
