Comparing the effectiveness of GPS-enhanced voice guidance for pedestrians with metric- and landmark-based instruction sets

Abstract

This paper reports on a field experiment comparing two different kinds of verbal turn instructions in the context of GPS-based pedestrian navigation. The experiment was conducted in the city of Salzburg with 20 participants. Both instruction sets were based on qualitative turn direction concepts. The first one was enhanced with metric distance information and the second one was enhanced with landmark-anchored directions gathered from participants of a previous field experiment. The results show that in context of GPS-enhanced pedestrian navigation both kinds of instruction sets lead to similar navigation performance. Results also demonstrate that effective voice-only guidance of pedestrians in unfamiliar environments at a minimal error rate and without stopping the walk is feasible. Although both kinds of instructions lead to similar navigation performance, participants clearly preferred landmark-enhanced instructions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.