Scalable Navigation Support for Crowds: Personalized Guidance via Augmented Signage

Navigating unfamiliar places is a common problem people face, and there is a wealth of commercial and research-based applications particularly for mobile devices that provide support in these settings. While many of these solutions work well on an individual level, they are less well suited for very crowded situations, e.g. sports matches, festivals and fairs, or events such as pilgrimages. In a large crowd, attending to a mobile device can be hazardous, the underlying technology might not scale well enough, and some people might be excluded due to not having access to a mobile device. Public signage does not suffer from these issues, and consequently, people frequently rely on signage in crowded settings. However, a key disadvantage of public signage is to not provide personalized navigation support. In this paper, we therefore investigate augmented signage as a means to provide navigation support for large crowds. We introduce a scalable signage-based approach and present results from a comparison study contrasting two designs for augmented signage with a base case. The results provide initial evidence that such a system could be easily useable, may help to reduce task load, and has the potential to improve navigation performance.