Tactile wayfinder: A non-visual support system for wayfinding

Digital maps and route descriptions on a PDA have become very popular for navigation, not the least with the advent of the iPhone and its Google Maps application. A visual support for wayfinding, however, is not reasonable or even possible all the time. A pedestrian must pay attention to traffic on the street, a hiker should concentrate on the nar-row trail, and a blind person relies on other modalities to find her way. To overcome these limitations, we developed a non-visual support for wayfinding that guides and keeps a mobile user en route by a tactile display. We designed a belt with vibrators that indicates directions and devia-tions from the path in an accurate and unobtrusive way. Our first user evaluation showed that on an open field with-out any landmarks the participants stayed well to given test routes and that wayfinding support is possible with our Tac-tile Wayfinder