Guiding Safe Pedestrian Navigation with Virtual Cues

Abstract

Mobile phones and other smart digital displays can provide pedestrian navigation guidance via GPS technology by displaying visual cues on a screen showing the most direct or efficient path to a destination. However, these systems fail to account for dynamically evolving safety situations, which could impact the pedestrians’ route choice and personal safety. The current study explores the use of virtual cues, displayed directly in an immersive environment, as an intermediate step toward developing augmented reality (AR) pedestrian navigation aids for safety. We investigated the effectiveness of three types of virtual safety cues: a ground area cue (GA), a distance to threat cue (DT), and a combined cue (CB) within a virtual environment. To explore cue effectiveness, participants performed a free navigation goal-directed task in an open urban environment, allowing them to navigate to a goal location without predefined route constraints. This task allowed for an evaluation of how individuals use potential safety cues to guide their wayfinding, and evaluated the impact of these cues on the time spent in danger zones, overall distance traveled to a target beacon, and pausing behavior. Our results indicated that cues providing a world-fixed visualization (GA and CB) reduced time spent in danger zones and reduced pausing frequency during navigation. We found no effect of cue condition on distance traveled. This study suggests that virtual cues could be effectively implemented in AR to enable individuals to make informed wayfinding decisions in the context of a threat in the environment.