Geographic Data Quality Management for Pedestrian Navigation In-the-wild

Abstract

Pedestrian navigation systems are essential not only for exploring unfamiliar cities but also for discovering unexpected experiences in daily life. While modern systems visualize point-to-point routes enriched with contextual information, such as building icons, terrain shapes, and nearby points of interest, deploying and evaluating them through in-the-wild experiments remains challenging. In this paper, we aim to discuss how researchers develop in-the-wild and customizable navigation systems and the challenges they face when conducting in-the-wild experiments. Based on our field study conducted in Hibiya Park using a system that combines volunteered geographic information and standard routing engines, this paper reports the two key findings. First, publicly available geographic data often lack the resolution; thus, we need to carefully setup navigation environments. Second, although precise tracking is technically possible, current positioning devices still face the inaccurate positioning results; thus, we need to moderate navigation systems to be realized in real-world environments, particularly when implementing original mobility experiences via navigation. Based on these findings, we argue for domain-specific refinement of open-source geographic data to design immersive mobility experiences.