Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität Berlin, 1970. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 4-14).

Syfte – Ta reda på hur man utformar en receptsida i avseende på design och anpassning för mobila enheter samt hur mycket detta påverkar den dagliga datatrafiken på webbplatsen. Metod – Litteratursökning, kvantitativ webbenkät, webbaserad intervju samt mätning och jämförelse av datatrafik på webbplatsen. Resultat – Navigation (struktur) på en webbplats är enligt många den viktigaste delen av webbplatsens innehåll. Navigationen ska även följa med i en mobilanpassning – för att användaren ska kunna känna igen sig på webbplatsen ska både strukturen och designen vara konsekvent. Smartphones är framtidens datorer, vi blir bara fler och fler som surfar via mobila enheter. Ska en webbplats hållas modern och kunna konkurrera med liknande sidor så måste den vara mobilanpassad. På så sätt tappar inte webbplatsen några besökare, och användarna stannar längre på webbplatsen eftersom de även kan navigera från sin smartphone (eller surfplatta). Begränsningar – Studien går endast på ytan av några av problemen som beskrivs i rapporten, eftersom en fysisk webbplats gjordes utöver studien. Empirin består mestadels av litteratursökning och en kvantitativ enkät. Den kvalitativa aspekten av en utav metodvalen försvann under arbetets gång och blev mest en blandning mellan kvantitativ/kvalitativ. Därför förlitade jag mig mest på min webbenkät när jag besvarade min första frågeställning. Nyckelord – användbarhet, navigation, datatrafik, responsiv webbdesign

The range camera in Microsoft's Kinect, intended for the Xbox 360 gaming console, offers a powerful alternative to the many standard sensors used in robotics for gathering spatial information about a robot’s surroundings. The recently-released Kinect is the first commercially available product to provide depth data of its resolution and accuracy with a price tag within reach of many robotics projects. The work described in this paper explores the feasibility of using this sensor by developing a robot that relies solely on the Kinect for sensory data. This robot successfully performs standard navigational procedures, demonstrating the possibility of integrating spatial information from the Kinect into a real-time robotics application. This paper documents the techniques used to integrate the Kinect into the system, highlighting the key benefits and limitations of the sensor. / text

The retention and recognition of landmarks within large-scale spaces (buildings or cities) plays an important role in way-finding and localization abilities. The current studies investigate our capacity for storing these views and the strategies used in deciding what information is stored and used. To investigate the issue of capacity we trained and tested subjects in six different environments with different levels of complexity. This manipulation was achieved by varying the number of states (position and orientations) within the environment from 10 to 132 in which each state generated a unique view. This manipulation generated environments in which the information content varied from 3 bits to 7.04 bits. We found no evidence of a capacity limitation for up to 7 bits of information. However, we did find that humans consistently lose about 1.25 bits of information regardless of the size of the environment. This finding was consistent in both virtual realty and in real environment. We further studied the nature of the information loss. Can gaze patterns reveal what information is being lost during the encoding process? / text

No description available.

This thesis investigates the relationship between communication and place, and the informational environment it forms. The thesis takes as its object of analysis signage, and examines signage as an implaced medium of communication. / In this work communication, including its practices and technologies, is treated as a dynamic ritual formed by the marking, naming, connecting, and interpreting the environment in the process of wayfinding. Such an approach underscores the inherent duality of communication: its manifestations framed by transmission and ritual; its boundedness by both space and time; and its expression in both mobile and fixed (implaced) media. The thesis thus shifts the disciplinary discourse from the usual text- and language-based focus to a more comprehensive focus that encompasses architectural and infrastructural environments and the grounding action of physical presences. Through its focus on the navigational aspects of communication, and framing by such concepts as wayfinding and signposting, the thesis shows how we can reconfigure the notion of the visual to include the embodied, experiential, and implaced. This in turn can help us gain a new perspective on the changing nature of text, image, representation, information and reality. / The thesis argues that as the themes of orientation, navigation, and interface grow alongside the new communication technologies, they make it important to attend to the original mediating role of the built environment and the navigational dimensions of place. It is here, within our foundational spatial orientation and wayfinding, that we turn for the metaphors, conceptual structures, and grounding as we chart our ways through the emerging informational environments. / In examining signage as a system of interfaces used in negotiating informational environments, as way-markers in a process of wayfinding, the thesis demonstrates the ways in which the concepts of wayfinding and navigation have become consequential to communication scholarship. It proposes that fruitful cues for the theorising and understanding of emerging informational realms can be drawn from the communicative dimensions of the most familiar immersive environments and their related practices: the physical spaces and built environments that we inhabit and negotiate daily.

No description available.

Everyday experience suggests that certain people can find their way to a destination easily, while others have considerable difficulty. This dissertation focused on gaining a greater understanding of navigational strategies that can facilitate or hinder an individual’s wayfinding performance. The first study was conducted to gain a broad idea of various factors that may influence navigational performance. Participants were guided through a building and then asked to find their way to a destination. It was found that good navigators made fewer errors in traversing a learned route than did poor navigators. They were also better at recognizing landmarks they had seen along the route, recalling the appropriate directions to be turned at each landmark, and at drawing the correct pathways on a map drawing task. A discriminant analysis revealed that the best predictor of determining navigational performance was the ability to form spatial relationships between landmarks. Results from the first study demonstrated that good navigators were better at determining spatial relationships between landmarks, but it did not address whether this was due to spatial relationships between distances and/or angles. The focus of the second study was to gain a greater understanding of the degree to which distance and angular information are used by good and poor navigators in determining spatial relationships between landmarks. Results showed that neither a distance nor an angular strategy were preferred in either group of wayfinders. An analysis of navigators initial heading angle error to a target location suggested that good wayfinders may be more efficient at finding their way because they appear to plan routes prior to initiating self-locomotion. Such pre-planning was confirmed by the fact that good wayfinders’ initial heading direction error was significantly less than in poor wayfinders. Poor wayfinders appear to head in a random direction and then attempt to determine target locations. The use of landmark information may be useful in certain contexts, but this may not always be the most efficient strategy. The last experiment was aimed at determining whether good navigators adjust strategies used (landmark vs. street), depending on contextual factors. Differences in strategies used were not found, however the results suggest that good navigators appear to be more skilled at navigating in environments rich with streets compared to poor wayfinders. Good and poor navigators were equally skilled at navigating in environments rich in landmarks. It appears that the ability to determine spatial relationships between landmarks is the strongest predictor of navigational performance compared to a wide range of other navigational skills.

Thesis (MEng)--University of South Australia, 1995

This thesis describes the theoretical and practical implementation of a long-range high-resolution millimetre wave imaging radar system to aid with the navigation and guidance of both airborne and ground-based autonomous vehicles. To achieve true autonomy, a vehicle must be able to sense its environment, comprehensively, over a broad range of scales. Objects in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle must be classified at high resolution to ensure that the vehicle can traverse the terrain. At slightly longer ranges, individual features such as trees and low branches must be resolved to allow for short-range path planning. At long range, general terrain characteristics must be known so that the vehicle can plan around difficult or impassable obstructions. Finally, at the largest scale, the vehicle must be aware of the direction to its objective. In the past, short-range sensors based on radar and laser technology have been capable of producing high-resolution maps in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle extending out to a few hundred metres at most. For path planning, and navigation applications where a vehicle must traverse many kilometres of unstructured terrain, a sensor capable of imaging out to at least 3km is required to permit mid and long-range motion planning. This thesis addresses this need by describing the development a high-resolution interrupted frequency modulated continuous wave (FMICW) radar operating at 94GHz. The contributions of this thesis include a comprehensive analysis of both FMCW and FMICW processes leading to an effective implementation of a radar prototype which is capable of producing high-resolution reflectivity images of the ground at low grazing angles. A number of techniques are described that use these images and some a priori knowledge of the area, for both feature and image based navigation. It is shown that sub-pixel registration accuracies can be achieved to achieve navigation accuracies from a single image that are superior to those available from GPS. For a ground vehicle to traverse unknown terrain effectively, it must select an appropriate path from as long a range as possible. This thesis describes a technique to use the reflectivity maps generated by the radar to plan a path up to 3km long over rough terrain. It makes the assumption that any change in the reflectivity characteristics of the terrain being traversed should be avoided if possible, and so, uses a modified form of the gradient-descent algorithm to plan a path to achieve this. The millimetre wave radar described here will improve the performance of autonomous vehicles by extending the range of their high-resolution sensing capability by an order of magnitude to 3km. This will in turn enable significantly enhanced capability and wider future application for these systems.