Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
To understand and technically support wayfinding during all times of day is
important for round-the-clock activities that require active navigation in such
domains as the rescue services, police and army. Scientific research on the percep-
tion and navigation between lighting conditions has been rare but everyday expe-
rience shows that changes are drastical. People see different kinds of landmarks and
apply different wayfinding strategies between day and night (Winter et al. 2005 ;
Kumagai and Tack 2005 ). Geospatial applications already exist in which map
colours adapt to night lighting. However, maps and other geospatial applications
that provide landmark ontologies do not change according to the change in the
lighting conditions. The motivation of our study is to address these changes in the
ontologies used during the day and at night. This can later help to develop
adaptation in geospatial applications, for example a terrain navigator that could
more effectively support people
s wayfinding in the varying lighting conditions by
providing the user with easily perceptible landmarks related to navigation
decisions.
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Previous Studies on Landmarks and Wayfinding at Night
There have been only a few studies that have investigated landmarks in real
environments under varying lighting conditions, particularly at night. The investi-
gations that have been carried out in nature are even fewer. We thus base our
present literature review mainly on landmark studies that consider experiments in
virtual environments and daytime conditions.
Kumagai and Tack ( 2005 ) conducted a wayfinding experiment at night in nature
with soldiers using night vision goggles. Based on performance time, traversed
distance and direction estimations, wayfinding proved to be significantly more
challenging at night compared to the day. The experiment did not guide participants
to rely on landmarks for navigating but instead the participants were asked to detect
enemy targets in the woods, a task which resembles a visual landmark search. The
detection of targets was significantly weaker under night conditions since night
vision goggles provided only a low contrast view at close distances.
Gauthier et al. ( 2008 ) also focused on night vision goggles and conducted their
landmark search experiment indoors in a small artificial maze where they could set
the lighting level similar to half moonlight for the goggle group. The control group
participated without night vision goggles in full lighting and performed signifi-
cantly better in the search, direction estimation and map drawing task. This
indicated that night vision goggles affected negatively both wayfinding perfor-
mance and the acquisition of spatial knowledge. The decrease in spatio-cognitive
performance while using night vision goggles suggests that similar restricted vistas,
such as while using a headlamp at night, are also likely to bring lower performance.
Winter et al. ( 2005 ) showed their participants panoramic images of city inter-
sections photographed during the day or at night and asked them to score the
prominence of facades in the images. The scores resulted in significant differences
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