Riku Suomela Æ Kimmo Roimela Æ Juha Lehikoinen

A wearable computer is a potential platform for map applications: it is mobile in nature, and is often equipped with a head-worn display capable of displaying maps of the surrounding area in graphical form. In this paper, we present a map application, called WalkMap, developed for wearable computers. We concentrate on the visual presentation of the map, and propose a visualisation method that is based on the perspective distortion of a regular two-dimensional bird's-eye view map. We also describe the results of a field study, and compare the distorted view to a reg- ular two-dimensional view. The results show that while a perspective visualisation is good for some naviga- tional tasks, for some other tasks a regular map is preferred. We then continue by developing the visu- alisation further, and present a fully adjustable three- dimensional version of the map application, called WalkMap3D. WalkMap3D can display the map area in three dimensions, but is also capable of displaying both traditional two-dimensional and perspective map views.