MapXplorer Handy: An Immersive Map Exploration System Using Handheld Device

In this paper, a map exploration system is presented to enhance user immersion and interaction experience on exploring map with Google Street View. The proposed system adopts a metaphor such that a user has an experience as if being on street with a map on his/her hands. To manifest this metaphor, the proposed system separates the map and the street view into two different field-of-views. The map view is served on a handheld device and the street view is displayed on a curved screen in front of the user. User interaction is performed through hand motion and multi-touch gesture upon the handheld device. Experiments consisting of map exploration and street navigation tasks are conducted to evaluate the proposed system. The experiment results show that the proposed system outperforms traditional map service on user tasks performance about 50 percents in average and it also provides superior user experience.