Abstract
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.
Highlights
Wayfinding refers to the decision-making component of navigation behaviour [1, pp. 257–294]
Because of heterogeneity of variance, number of errors was analysed using an ART ANOVA. Both parametric and nonparametric analyses revealed a main effect of crowd movement on number of errors, whereas the effect of map types on number of errors was only revealed by the parametric analysis
We investigated the effects of map design and crowd movement on spatial decisionmaking in virtual reality (VR)
Summary
Wayfinding refers to the decision-making component of navigation behaviour [1, pp. 257–294]. Information in an observer’s environment that may facilitate decision-making, and people can flexibly 2 switch from one source to another [2]. We investigated the effects of cues in the immediate environment and from other people on decision-making during navigation through a virtual airport terminal. Moussaïd and colleagues [9] found that individuals were more likely to follow others as a crowd during a stressful (virtual) evacuation than during a relatively calm wayfinding task. Other studies have suggested that this type of following behaviour does not always occur during wayfinding [10], even during an emergency evacuation [11]. We define ‘following behaviour’ as conforming to the actions of the crowd
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
