Exploring 3D Landmark-based Map Interface in AR Navigation System for City Exploration

Nowadays pedestrian navigation not only provides reliable route planning and efficient wayfinding instructions but also visualizes location-based information for supporting exploratory activities, for example, visualizing and recommending some Point-of-interests (POIs). With the Augmented Reality (AR) technology development, it provides more imagination in navigation field, especially in AR POIs visualization of map interface. However, a user’s experience during navigation activities is easy to suffer from information overload and difficulty of identifying the spatial knowledge from POIs. In this work, we aimed to explore a 3D landmark-based map interface in AR navigation to support location awareness and spatial knowledge acquisition. The results of a preliminary user study indicated that participants had positive attitudes to using 3D landmark-based map. The interviews showed it could help them recognize their locations better and learn spatial knowledge of POIs surrounding them, but it also increased mental and effort pressure during different phase of exploration, which engages us to modify our work in the future.