Facilitating Wayfinding Using a Hypermedia Representation of Spatial Cognitive Maps

Navigation in large-scale natural environments is not new and has been dealt with some success across various cultures and species in the animal kingdom. Currently, interest in navigation and wayfinding has been revived by difficulties users usually experience when navigating through large-scale 3D computer virtual environments (CVEs). In this paper, the facilitation of wayfinding in such environments using non-geometric representations of space is explored. Our main concerns are to illustrate how a representation of cognitive maps of the space under navigation can be constructed so that it can be exploited to aid space knowledge acquisition, its maintenance or repair, the solving of navigation queries, and, the formulation of navigation commands for autonomous navigation. We support the ideas introduced with a description of an example navigational aid for 3D CVEs, together with the windfall benefits that this approach brings as far as history mechanisms, navigation in shared virtual 3D environments and collaborative wayfinding are concerned.