Mental Tectonics - Rendering Consistent µMaps

The visualization of spatial information for wayfinding assistance requires a substantial amount of display area. Depending on the particular route, even large screens can be insufficient to visualize all information at once and in a scale such that users can understand the specific course of the route and its spatial context. Personalized wayfinding maps, such as μMaps are a possible solution for small displays: they explicitly consider the prior knowledge of a user with the environment and tailor maps toward it. The resulting schematic maps require substantially less space due to the knowledge based visual information reduction. In this paper we extend and improve the underlying algorithms of μMaps to enable efficient handling of fragmented user profiles as well as the mapping of fragmented maps. Furthermore we introduce the concept of mental tectonics, a process that harmonizes mental conceptual spatial representations with entities of a geographic frame of reference.