"Turn Left After the Heater": Landmark Navigation for Visually Impaired Users

Indoor navigation is a challenging task for visually impaired people. Existing technologies promise to provide support for autonomous way finding; however, the accuracy of low-budget approaches is low and can lead to frustration amongst users. The presented ongoing work is based on suggestions in the literature that contextual information such as sudden changes in the surface structure or landmarks could supplement distance estimations to improve the user experience during navigation tasks. Following a user-centered design approach, a real-time interactive prototype with localization was implemented and evaluated. First results from a pilot study confirmed the hypothesis that user experience is improved by contextual information and showed that contextual information are accepted and appreciated by users.