How to Design an Advanced Pedestrian Navigation System: Field Trial Results

Location based services are more and more establishing themselves on the market. Various providers of navigation applications are trying to benefit from this development and promote their solutions with the option "suitable for pedestrian navigation". But still these systems use vocabulary and routing only appropriate to car navigation. A key feature of context-aware applications is the ability to connect the current user position to possible activities nearby. Particularly with regard to mobile tourist applications pedestrian navigation systems need to be 100% accurate. This paper describes a field study comparing four different navigational concepts for pedestrians currently available. All of these systems are based on recent state of the art approaches and have been evaluated by real users. At the end this paper will come up with a recommendation for designing mobile pedestrian navigation systems.