Mindful navigation with guiding light : design considerations for projector based indoor navigation assistance system

Abstract

People can easily become mindless in their decision-making and become disengaged from their surroundings when their actions depend on information and guidance from an assistive technology. Research has shown how automated navigation assistance systems lead users to be disengaged from the space through which they are traveling, resulting in poor recollection of the environment and poorer situational decision-making. This disengagement and mindlessness can potentially increase the risk of accidents and lower the quality of user experience. If we can help people become mindfully attentive to the environment and surroundings while carrying out navigation tasks using assistive technologies, I hypothesize that we will have better memory of the space, improved cognitive reconstruction of environment, and better understanding of the immediate situation, all of which will lead to better decision making and more efficient navigation. In this work, I present a new approach for analyzing the problem of navigation assistance for pedestrians, which considers both the physical and psychological constraints of users focused on navigation. I address the physical constraint that eyes should remain "on the street" by providing a new visual interface, named Guiding Light, that offers a mixed reality presentation of guidance information in the environment itself, instead of on a screen. We address the psychological constraint that minds should remain engaged with the environment by applying a framework based on mindfulness and mindlessness theory (Langer 1989) in the design of the system. The theory explains how mindsets affect engagement levels and decision-making in daily activities. In addition, this thesis describes an indoor positioning technology that provides relatively high accuracy localization and heading orientation of a user in indoor environments. The innovation not only involved developing a new sensor but also a software system to collect fingerprint maps and tracking location with the fingerprint maps. This new technology opens up a new area in the field to explore other possibilities of using a magnetic field based positioning system.