A Study On The Performance Of GPS Wayfinding Aid With Virtual Reality

GPS (Global Positioning System) is currently the most often used wayfinding aidfor driving. Yet, GPS is designed to provide an efficient driving guide rather than tohelp users gain spatial knowledge. Accordingly, GPS hinders the construction ofcognitive map and might be less usable in situations where such knowledge is highlyrequired. This study is aimed at evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of GPS andimproving its cognitive performance.Two factors were considered in this study: the wayfinding aid pattern (active orpassive) and information display scale (single or dual). Combination of the two factorsgenerates four types of wayfinding aids. Three of them were experimentally comparedusing simulated driving tasks in a virtual environment: a single-scale GPS (SGPS), adual-scale GPS (DGPS) and a dual-scale exploration aid (DSEA). The othercombination, single-scale exploration, is actually NOT an aid, thus it was NOTconsidered. The SGPS is similar to regular GPS view. The DGPS aid is a dual-scalenavigation tool, providing two levels of details-both detailed and contextualinformation. The DSEA, which also provides two levels of details-both detailed andcontextual information, supported participants in finding and selecting routes bythemselves. The objective and subjective performances of participants were measuredand compared.Results show that SGPS, which is the simplified model of regular GPS, is good atwayfinding efficiency, but not at the exploration of space. These aids with “GPS”(SGPS&DGPS) performed better in the wayfinding time, errors and the aids with“dual-scale”(DGPS&DSEA) were good at establishing spatial awareness andcognitive map. The integrated aid, the DGPS was most efficient to lead participants tothe destination and corresponded to lest turning errors in simulated driving; it was moreuseful for the DGPS participants to establish spatial awareness and a cognitive map; theDGPS participants also reported higher subjective evaluations, which are consistentwith the objective performance measurements.The proposed wayfinding aid design and experimental results show someindications for designing new wayfinding aids. Multi-scale techniques will play an important role in the design of wayfinding aids aiming at increasing wayfindingperformance, reducing wayfinding errors, promoting self-exploration and constructingcognitive map while still providing easy navigation.