A Gamification-Based Approach on Indoor Wayfinding Research

Indoor environments can be very complex. Due to the challenges in these environments in combination with the absence of mobile wayfinding aids, a great need exists for innovative research on indoor wayfinding. In this explorative study, a game was developed in Unity to investigate whether the concept of gamification could be used in studies on indoor wayfinding so as to provide useful information regarding the link between wayfinding performance, personal characteristics, and building layout. Results show a significant difference between gamers and non-gamers as the complexity of the player movement has an important impact on the navigation velocity in the game. However, further analysis reveals that the architectural layout also has an impact on the navigation velocity and that wrong turns in the game are influenced by the landmarks at the decision points: navigating at deeper decision points in convex spaces is slower and landmarks of the categories pictograms and infrastructural were more effective in this particular building. Therefore, this explorative study, which provides an approach for the use of gamification in indoor wayfinding research, has shown that serious games could be successfully used as a medium for data acquisition related to indoor wayfinding in a virtual environment.