Navigation

At present, various types of navigation systems are integrated into the car almost as a standard. While these systems promise to serve a valuable support, they represent a challenge by reason of being hazardous if interfering with the driving task. Although various improvements to reduce the driver ’s workload have been made during the last decades, they still face two common problems: On the one hand the driver has to take his eyes away from the street scenery to catch navigational information and on the other hand cognitive effort is required to interpret abstract metaphors on the navigation display and translate them to the real world. In this thesis we investigated Augmented Reality based techniques as a novel approach for user interaction in terms of navigation systems. This technology in combination with an integrated Head-Up Displays technology provides an attractive approach to augment the street scenery with conformal navigational aids. Conformal navigational aid’s are virtual elements (e.g. arrows) for route guidance information, which appear to be aligned with the street and are thereby seemingly integrated into the real environment. With this approach of displaying such navigational aids into the Head-Up Display, that these appear to be part of the street scenery a variety of new research challenges arise. In this work special attention is given to the graphical design and development of conformal visualization schemes and to the implementation of a system to evaluate the limitations of such schemes in terms of the design and technology. Furthermore the identification of indication limitations, induced by the optical setup, was considered to be of high importance. Thus a usability study has been performed to identify a distance threshold for conformal indication and whether this threshold can be influenced by the design of the presentation schemes.