Assignment 1 - Paper Reading #1

Intro:

• Paper reading #1: Influence of landmark-based navigation instructions on user attention in indoor smart spaces
• Reference information:
• Petteri Nurmi, Antti Salovaara, Sourav Bhattacharya, Teemu Pulkkinen, and Gerrit Kahl. 2011. Influence of landmark-based navigation instructions on user attention in indoor smart spaces. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-42. DOI=10.1145/1943403.1943410 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1943403.1943410
• Peteri Nurmi - HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology)
• Publication years: 2005-2012
• Publication count: 25
• Citation count: 36
• Antti Salovaara - HIIT
• Publication years: 2004-2011
  
• Publication count: 23
• Citation count: 191
• Sourav Bhattacharya - HIIT
• Publication years: 2008-2011
  
• Publication count: 6
• Citation count: 6
• Teemu Pulkkinen - HIIT
• Publication years: 2011-2012
  
• Publication count: 2
• Citation count: 0
• Gerrit Kahl - German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI (Saarbrucken, Germany) 
• Publication years: 2008-2012
  
• Publication count: 8
• Citation count: 3

Summary:

An experiment on 20 people was conducted using 2 different types of landmark-based navigation techniques to determine the influence each technique has on a human's attention to their surroundings. The two types of navigation were sign-based (where instructions were given based on neutral landmarks like aisles and large areas) and product-based (where instructions were given based on categories of items). The experiment was performed in a grocery store where two items were to be found through sign-based navigation, two items through product-based navigation, and one product without any aid. After conducting the experiment, the participants were asked about products they may have walked by while looking for their landmarks. By analyzing the data, they found that sign-based navigation was more efficient/faster in finding an item due to the signs being visible from a far distance. Product-based navigation was slower because it required scanning of surroundings to find the landmark (category of food). However, both techniques did not improve the attention a user pays to their surroundings when searching for landmarks. The unaided portion of the experiment showed that humans pay more attention to their surroundings when not looking for landmarks.


Related work not referenced in the paper:

—1. Landmark-based pedestrian navigation from collections of geotagged photos 

    (talks about how using landmarks through photos is beneficial in navigation)

—2. A natural wayfinding exploiting photos in pedestrian navigation systems

—3. Indoor pedestrian navigation system using a modern smartphone

—4. Comparing the effectiveness of GPS-enhanced voice guidance for pedestrians with metric- and
    landmark-based instruction sets (used voice only landmarks through metric distance and landmark 
    descriptions)

—5. Exploring the use of landmarks for mobile navigation support in natural environments

—6. ONTRACK: Dynamically adapting music playback to support navigation

—7. Acquisition of spatial knowledge in location aware mobile pedestrian navigation systems (similar)

—8. Auditory perceptible landmarks in mobile navigation

—9. EyeSound: single-modal mobile navigation using directionally annotated music

—10. Supporting 3D route planning in indoor space based on the LEGO representation (blocks represent volumes of space)

—All of theses works appropriately talked about using different kinds of navigation techniques to 
guide the user, but not all talked about making the user more aware of their surroundings. Most 
works were novel and used different strategies for navigation.

Evaluation:

The authors evaluated the work using a quantitative approach and used, both, biased (subjective) and unbiased (objective) measures. To evaluate the time it took to find a product, a researcher used a stopwatch to time the participants. They evaluated mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand, performance, effort, and frustration using a Likert scale (1-7) with 1 being less demanding. The results showed that, overall, the participants felt that the sign-based instructions were easier to follow and made them feel like they did better. Product-based instructions made participants feel more frustrated and required them to try much harder to find what they were looking for. The evaluation was systemic because it analyzed the the navigating system and techniques as a whole.

7

1    Mental Demand  |Physical Demand|     Temporal     |    Performance    |         Effort         |    Frustration
  

Discussion: 

I think the work and contribution was good, although the experiment did not show any difference in a humans attention to his/her surroundings using the 2 different navigation techniques. It was good in the sense that it showed that sign-based navigation (where users can see the landmark from far away) was better in helping a human find an item than product-based navigation. It will also encourage new experiments to take place to see what makes humans pay more attention to their surroundings. I believe the evaluation was appropriate because it used both biased and unbiased measures to come up with the same outcome (sign-based is better). It tested every possible scenario and was thorough. The contribution is somewhat new. There have been tests using indoor navigation but have been really limited due to the setup difficulty and cost of indoor mobile pedestrian devices. Most navigation tests have been performed outdoors (Google Maps, Ovi Maps, etc.).