Effect Analysis of Real and Virtual Spaces for Tourist Map-making of a Familiar Location

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of environmental factors for map-making of a familiar location through ex- periments and analysis. The environmental factor in this paper is creators’ space for map-making: physical and virtual spaces. The creators in the physical space walk the place on foot and choose spots that are preferable for tourist attractions while those in the virtual space conduct them on a Web service. Though the location is the same and familiar for the creators, they may create different maps because they are in different spaces. We invited participants to join the experiments, in which they made a tourist map of our university campus as one of the familiar locations. We collected data for the analysis: the number of tourist attractions and the rate of exciting tourist attractions. We found that if the map-making environment was virtual, then the map had more tourist attractions than a physical one. However, there was no difference in the rates of exciting tourist attractions.