Find your way with your eyes closed.
Close your eyes and think about the station you use most on your commute.
You can probably navigate your way from the ticket barriers to the platform to train without issues. You know your perfect route to the barriers and walk the same steps to the platform daily. You can even stand exactly where the doors open without thinking about it.?
Try doing that for a station you have never visited before. Impossible; you don't even know what is there, but with your eyes open, a new station is no problem.
You might not even notice, but wayfinding methodology is how you find your way in important public places like train stations, hospitals, and educational facilities. Sprawling areas with many different sections always seem to be very easily navigated, even if you've never been there or planned a route.
Wayfinding is an information system that guides you through an environment, enhancing your understanding and experience of the space. When it is done right, it's the reason that whatever complex environment you are in, you can get to where you need to be, and for places you often visit, like your main station, you feel like you can make the journey with your eyes closed.
How does wayfinding do this?
There are five fundamental principles to all wayfinding design:
These principles are so natural that you might not even think about them—the colour-coded routes guiding you through a hospital to reach your Doctor or to visit a loved one. The clearly labelled platforms at a station ensure you get to your train once you have checked the easy-to-read departure board. The signs and arrows ushering you to a taxi rank at an airport make sure you can reach your hotel.
These visible signs make us feel comfortable that we can get wherever we need to go with little worry or anxiety.
Finding your way in the dark
Wayfinding might make you think you can get around with your eyes closed, but what if you can't see? How do these wayfinding techniques help?
Colour coding is only helpful if you can see it. Digital signage keeps you in the dark, and a platform announcement doesn't help you get there.
An environment that requires wayfinding is typically crowded, noisy and bustling with people. It is enough to raise anyone's anxiety, but it is more than an anxious situation if you can't see. It is a challenge that forces many people to become reliant on the help of others. Not just an uneasy situation but one where you might feel like a burden. A burden upon your friends and family or forced to find a staff member to help you.
4-Roads imagining a world where technology takes you where you need to be
Where traditional wayfinding methods don't work, 4-Roads sees where technology can step in and provide wayfinding in a new way.
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Most technology solutions to wayfinding for the impaired look at placing beacons around locations that a user can connect to directly through an app. Beacons have yet to become a widely adopted solution because of the complexity and cost of infrastructure changes. Physical beacons need to be installed and maintained, and if they fail, you leave a user lost with no easy route to reach help.
Thinking about this problem, we realised that SLAM was an ideal solution.
Simultaneous
Localisation
And
Mapping
This technology works through a device connected to multiple sensors. Through these sensors, the device collects information about the environment. Typically a camera and gyroscope will be enough to paint the right picture, but depending on what is being mapped, you can also use tools such as lidar.
The sensors used begin to capture the environment in tremendous amounts of detail. Software takes these details and starts generating an immense number of feature points. While developing these feature points, orientation and locations are mapped and compared.
Once the area has been mapped out correctly, the challenge gets even more significant. How do you transmit this information to a user?
For a regular user, it is simple; the detailed mapping makes planning and understanding the area incredibly simple. You can plot your route before you have even set foot in the building. For a visually impaired user, using haptic feedback was a starting point.
But upon testing, we realised that holding a phone to feel haptic vibrations while walking with a guide cane wasn't necessarily the best user experience. Adding audio sounds as an option helped to solve this experience.
For areas with changing landscapes, for example, a station with a Christmas tree or a charity event, a certain amount of dynamic information is needed to ensure the user finds the safe way. A simple remapping is possible, adding the new obstacles to the map to make certain that a user avoids these temporary obstacles.
There is also an option to use the camera technology on your phone. Again, holding a phone up while walking in a busy area is hard enough; doing that with only one hand free is not ideal. A simple lanyard to hold a phone around a user's neck allows the camera to see the area around, scanning in real-time and guiding the user away from obstacles that may not have been on the initial area mapping.
It all sounds so simple, but if it were, Google would already have done it!
The technology and approach we are using here at 4-Roads will hopefully change how we see the accessibility of many buildings and critical areas. We are imagining a world in which everyone can get around easily and without any anxiety or reliance on the kindness of strangers.
The LNER innovation programme is an excellent example of a partner that cares about its accessibility and wayfaring beyond the standard. Birmingham Council has also begun an innovation programme designed to give all people better, more accessible access to all public transport. The technology is here; now it's time for adoption.