Experience Augmented Pedestrian Wayfinding

This thesis explores collaborative route planning for pedestrians, where the users’s experience with the system and with the suggested routes augment the route planning for other users. I describe a technique for sharing experiences between groups of users that share some common characteristics. The technique is demonstrated with an experimental application running on Smartphones and PDAs. The device that the application is developed on is connected to a GPS device via a Bluetooth connection, and it uses open, freely available Web Map Services (WMS) for map images. The application allows for point to point route planning, searching for a route to the closest point of interest of a particular kind (f.ex. the closest accessible parking space), user feedback to routes, GPS tracking and recording of user movements, and creation of new roads by the individual user. Route planning is performed using the classic A* algorithm on a road network consisting both of proprietary data (from the Norwegian Mapping Authority) and open data (from the Open Street Maps project).