Landmarks are a fundamental component in understanding human spatial processing (from vision through to navigation). This project developed an in-field methodology to analyse how the visual salience of landmarks is related to people’s ability to use them for orientation and navigation within a landscape. Using a tour around University Park campus Nottingham (of the style used with visitors on open days) as a focus, a simple locative media application on a smartphone acted as the visitor's guide. At points along that route media elements relating to places of interest were automatically triggered by the phone’s GPS location. The users had to then attempt to identify objects in the real world scene that related to the media triggered. To record the features user’s chose, and the time taken for them to identify them, a modified version of the mobile phone app Zapp was used. Zapp is an experimental app developed by Sam Meek to remotely capture points of interest within the context of field-based learning and for remote geotagging. Zapp captured the location of the feature at the centre of the phone’s camera view at the time of capture, but also stored the photos themselves. These were passed through image salience software to explore whether the features captured were particularly visually salient, at least as expressed through the analysis software. Initial findings are reported in the paper below.Research Outcomes |
