Transcendent communication: Location-based guidance for large-scale public spaces

Many studies have been conducted on supporting communication in home and office spaces, but relatively few studies have explored supporting communication in large-scale public spaces, despite the importance of such environments in our daily lives. We propose a transcendent means of communication as an emerging style in this pervasive computing era: a system that allows administrative staff to effectively help visitors in large-scale public spaces. The visitors' context is used to provide a bird's-eye view of a simulated public space for the staff to grasp the situation and point at a particular location within the view to indicate the visitors they intend to address. The results of an experiment showed synergic effects between the bird's-eye view and the first-person one in determining the spatial movements of people. In indoor and outdoor large-scale public spaces, a central railway station and a park, we installed our prototypes and learned the implications of its use.