Jakub Krukar

• Professor
• Junior Professor in Spatial Cognition at University of Münster

Sketch maps are valuable tools used across various disciplines including spatial cognition, environmental psychology, and spatial reasoning. A common approach to evaluate sketch maps in research is to align and compare them with metric maps. However, sketch maps are highly abstract and contain generalized information causing difficulty in their ali...

For a long time, research has investigated spatial behaviour of people in navigation research and identified different wayfinding strategies. Researchers agree, that the environment with its structure and features influences the wayfinding strategies. The present paper presents a tool to investigate people’s strategies during navigation tasks. GeoG...

Several user studies have been conducted to evaluate the User Experience (UX) of thematic mobile maps, but models describing the results beyond point studies are still lacking. This article explored mathematical functions to predict the UX on the visualization types Choropleth Maps and Graduated Symbol Maps. Ten different Choropleth Maps and ten di...

Sketch maps are considered a reliable method for assessing spatial knowledge. However, it is unknown whether all information types in sketch maps are reconstructed with similar accuracy under differing task instructions. Here, we show that the dominant information type and metric accuracy of sketches of a single environment drawn by the same person...

When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining measures of participants' survey knowledge, i.e., their estimate of distant locations relative to other places. Previous work showed that distance estimations are consistently biased when no direct route is available to the queried target or when participa...

Car drivers can benefit from schematized maps because they require a different level and type of information from different areas of the map. The technical challenge of creating such maps is that a schematic car route map should be optimized for the individual route, and yet simultaneously present the surrounding street network to support orientati...

Sketch maps are one of the most commonly used instruments to study people's perception of the environment. While previous research has focused on analyzing sketch maps with respect to their accuracy, completeness, or distortion, there is little study focusing on generalization (the level of geometric details of the depicted features) in sketch maps...

Today’s navigation systems use topographic maps to communicate route information. Being general-purpose maps, topographic maps lack optimal support for the specific task of route reading and navigation. In the public transportation domain, research demonstrated that topographic maps do not support planning of routes as good as schematic maps. Our c...

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has become a popular method for fundamental and applied spatial cognition research. One challenge researchers face is emulating walking in a large-scale virtual space although the user is in fact in a small physical space. To address this, a variety of movement interfaces in VR have been proposed, from trad...

Predominant navigation applications make use of a turn-by-turn instructions approach and are mostly supported by small screen devices. This combination does little to improve users' orientation or spatial knowledge acquisition. Considering this limitation, we propose a route schematization method aimed for small screen devices to facilitate the rea...

Isovist analysis has been typically applied for the study of human perception in indoor built-up spaces. Albeit predominantly in 2D, recent works have explored isovist techniques in 3D. However, 3D applications of isovist analysis simply extrapolate the assumptions of its 2D counterpart, without questioning whether these assumptions remain valid in...

The spatial arrangement of artworks is recognized as one of the key elements of exhibition design. The underlying assumption is that the layout can strengthen the impact of individual exhibits, because the way visitors visually engage with artworks affects how they are cognitively processed. This paper explores the influence of the exhibits’ visual...

Turn-by-turn instructions of navigation systems do not fully correspond to the way in which people typically communicate spatial information to each other. Previous research demonstrated that the acquisition of survey knowledge from such instructions is challenging. In the present study we investigate whether it is possible to create wayfinding ins...

GPS-based navigation devices use large-scale visualizations of the route, where the focus lies on turn instructions. Although efficient on the wayfinding task, this approach does not support survey knowledge acquisition, which is essential for the user to build up a cognitive map and obtain orientation. Another visualization option is the small-sca...

The prevalent use of GPS-based navigation systems impairs peoples' ability to orient themselves. This paper investigates whether wayfinding maps that accentuate different types of environmental features support peoples' spatial learning. A virtual-reality driving simulator was used to investigate spatial knowledge acquisition in assisted wayfinding...

GPS-based navigation systems are widely used to get wayfinding assistance. Current navigation systems incorporate different map scales for presenting wayfinding instructions, however, the selection of scale is not supported by psychological findings. Different tasks of the users such as the identification of the next decision point or the orientati...

Subjective risk perception during urban cycling has been mostly investigated through questionnaire studies. However, newly available data sources promise extended possibilities for the investigation and understanding of the underlying factors. We validate the rationale for using both opportunistically available crowd-sourced data (i.e., volunteered...

Poster Abstract Spatial behavior analysis in indoor environments is challenging: GPS is not available to track the location. Furthermore, analyzing the interaction of people with their environment goes beyond pure movement trajectories. Since the recording is manual, applying it to simultaneous observation of groups or large-scale environment is ch...

People easily get lost when their navigation support systems malfunction. Previous research has focussed on enriching route descriptions with salient features, or developing methods to better visualize distant features on small screen devices in order to support spatial knowledge acquisition. In this paper we investigate the question, which feature...

Maps are often used to navigate in unfamiliar environments. However, maps that are displayed on small screen devices cannot simultaneously display overview and detailed information. To bridge that gap, we aim to develop orientation maps and argue that these maps should only display relevant map features instead of simply reducing detailed informati...

Location uncertainty is often ignored but a key context parameter for location-based services. The standard way of visualizing location uncertainty on mobile devices is using a concentric circle. However, the impact of different visual variables (shape, size, boundary, middle dot, color) of this standard visualization on users is not well understoo...

Multiple approaches to support non-visual navigation have been proposed, of which traditional auditory turn-by-turn navigational systems achieved high popularity. Despite being modified according to the needs of visually impaired users, the underlying dataset communicated to the wayfinder is sourced primarily from traditional POI databases which ar...

Dominant approaches in computer-assisted wayfinding support adhere to the deeply problematic principles of turn-by-turn navigation. In this article, we suggest a new approach called “Wayfinding Through Orientation,” which supports the acquisition of spatial knowledge and cognitive mapping for advancing the user’s spatial orientation. Being oriented...

This study analyzes different ways of representing vaguely defined places from a set of sketch maps specifically when used in giving route instructions. A total of 30 participants who are familiar with the study area were asked to sketch a route map consisting of pre-identified set of places. The task involved two groups: intra-city route and inter...

Place is a core component of human spatial knowledge and therefore a central topic in GI Science. People use externalizations of mental spatial representations to communicate about space. Textual descriptions and graphical descriptions are the two main modes of communication. In this paper a distinction of three scales of spatial descriptions is as...

The current special issue of KI Journal brings together a collection of articles related to landmark-based navigation. This includes the problems of identifying suitable landmark candidates in a scalable manner, selecting landmarks which are relevant to the navigating agent, communicating their presence on maps, and integrating them into location-b...

Nowadays overcoming interaction blindness in designing interaction methods on public displays is still a challenging task. In this work, we present our study on evaluating the effectiveness of two methods (animation and video) in overcoming people's interaction blindness on gesture-based public displays. Our study shows that an animation-based meth...

The act of designing a building is indirectly, but conceptually very closely, linked to the user experience of its final outcome. It is this experience which often constitutes a major criterion for assessing the quality of the architect’s work. And yet, it would be a gross overstatement to suggest that architectural design is a user-centered proces...

The spatial organisation of museums and its influence on the visitor experience has been the subject of numerous studies. Previous research, despite reporting some actual behavioural correlates, rarely had the possibility to investigate the cognitive processes of the art viewers. In the museum context, where spatial layout is one of the most powerf...