How to write a good MSc thesis at SPARC

Sketch maps are traditionally drawn on a flat sheet of paper. However, with accessible, consumer-grade Virtual Reality devices it is now very easy to put on a VR headset and "draw in the air". This might be particularly useful in situations where you want to communicate how the environment looks in the vertical. For instance, when you want to draw a path of drone flying above some landscape, or describe to another person how to navigate a multi-level shopping mall, or explain to a friend how to get out of a metro station near your home.

The goal of this thesis is to understand the potential of 3D sketch maps in VR as a tool for communicating spatial knowledge.

The thesis can be approached from two perspectives:

From the technological perspective it is possible to design new ways of drawing 3D sketch maps in Virtual Reality, and compare them to traditional paper sketch maps. It is also interesting to explore how complex 3D sketch maps can be analysed systematically and what tools can we design to support the analysis of such (sometimes very complex and very messy) 3D drawings.

From the research perspective it is necessary to conduct user experiments to understand whether people can make good use of this new possibility offered by VR, or do they always find it more intuitive to draw on paper. Also, it is important to identify contexts in which 3D sketch maps are necessary - perhaps for most navigational scenarios a sheet of paper is sufficient? If so, what are specific cases (aviation, complex buildings) where 3D sketch maps are necessary?

One straight-forward way to study this is to ask participants to play a VR game where vertical navigation is important (virtual scuba diving, submarine simulator, flying a star wars battleship, a drone, or a passanger plane, downhill skiing) and ask them to draw sketch maps based on this experience.

Kim, K. G., Krukar, J., Mavros, P., Zhao, J., Kiefer, P., Schwering, A., ... & Raubal, M. (2022). 3D Sketch Maps: Concept, Potential Benefits, and Challenges. In 15th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2022) (Vol. 240, p. 14). Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik.

Virtual Realtiy is known to cause distortions in our pereception of distance. Things inside VR seem closer than they would be in reality. This is an interesting problem because many wayfinding studies use VR as a substitute of real life environments. Yet, if we know that distance estimations are consistently distorted in VR, can we trust VR results using other methods for measuring spatial knowledge?

The goal of this thesis is to compare different methods of measuring spatial knowledge, in particular:

- sketch maps (qualitative and metric-based analyses)

- distance estimation tasks

- pointing tasks

- perspective taking tasks

across the Virtual Reality environment and corresponding real life environment.

The hypothesis is that some of these methods work equally well in VR and in real life environments, while others should not be used in VR. For example, our  analysis from the paper below suggests that people who explore the same building in VR and in the real world draw equally good sketch maps, even though their distance estimation is distorted in VR.

Li, H., Mavros, P., Krukar, J., & Hölscher, C. (2021). The effect of navigation method and visual display on distance perception in a large-scale virtual building. Cognitive Processing, 22(2), 239-259.

For decades, sketchmaps have been used as a tool for measuring spatial knowledge - i.e., for estimating how well participants know and understand some areas. However, evidence from psychological memory studies demonstrates, that drawing something can also be a good strategy to memorise a set of object. For instance, if you need to memorise the setting of a room, drawing the room as you see it is a better memorisation strategy than repeating the names of the objects verbally or in your head. This thesis will test whether drawing a sketch map is a good memorisation strategy for spatial environments and how this approach can be implemented in a gamified app. The problem is relevant for situations in which people must learn new spatial environments, e.g. to become taxi/delivery drivers, or when they move to a new city.
The thesis can be completed with focus on one of two aspects:
**Computational focus:** You will design a teaching app that (a) records the user's trajectory together with a list of landmarks that were visible along the route, and (b) after a delay, asks users to draw the area that they have travelled. Here the key problem may be to select routes and landmarks that the user should be asked to draw (based on the recorded trajectories).
**Evaluation focus:** You will design and conduct an experiment to evaluate the following research question: does drawing a sketchmap help people memorise the environment better, compared to alternative strategies? This does not require creating an app, and can be conducted as an in-situ experiment, or inside our Virtual Reality lab.

Perceived Spaciousness is the subjective feeling of how large a given space is. Just think about the difference between the seminar room 242 vs. the atrium in the centre of the GEO1 building. Does the atrium feel 5x larger? 10x larger? 20x larger? Or imagine walking through a small entrance into a large temple. How much volume does it need to have to create the feeling of "wow, this is huge!" ?

Resaerch has shown that people have very distorted way of judging this and that the volume of space alone (the amount of "empty air" surrounding you) is not the only important factor. It matters what shape this empty space has (is it taller or longer?), where you are currently standing (above or below the open space? close to the wall or in its centre?), and where you entered it from (entering into a large room from a small one vs a small one from a large one).

The goal of this thesis is to understand what affects our peceived spaciousness. The thesis can approached from two perspectives.

From the technological perspective it is necessary to create new ways of studying perceived spaciousness in Virtual Reality. Researchers used various ways to ask people "how spacious does this space feel right now?" - they asked them verbally to rank it from 1 to 7, or gave them a circular dial that participants rotated when they felt more spacious. VR opens the chance to create better ways to gather this kind of data.

From the research perspective VR offers us the chance to design architectural experiments impossible in real life. For instance, we can move a person from a very small space to an extremely spacious one in a matter of seconds, and test their reactions. We can change their pathway (e.g., reverse it so that they move from a large space to a small one) and see if the reaction is symmetric. We can also systematically modify the Virtual Reality rooms by changing their shape, size, or lighting, and test how these changes affect perceived spaciousness.

Krukar, J., Manivannan, C., Bhatt, M., & Schultz, C. (2021). Embodied 3D isovists: A method to model the visual perception of space. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 48(8), 2307-2325.

Buildings of the future will have to be much more flexible than they are now. One envisioned possibility is that building interiors will change their shapes depending on the current context of use, personal preference of their users, or tasks that the occupants have to perform within them at the given moment. While this may sound like a distant vision of the future, Virtual Reality equipment already allows us to study such scenarios today.

In this thesis, you will design a Virtual Reality building that participants will explore in Head-Mounted Displays. The VR system will monitor spatio-temporal data of the building user, and create the remaining (yet unvisited) parts of the building in response to this data, before the user gets there.

The specific context of this thesis can be adjusted based on your interests. One possibility would be to detect navigational confusion based on the occupant's walking trajectory, and - in response - provide a navigationally simplified space in the next room that the occupant is going to visit. Another possibility is to detect loss of attention in a virtual museum gallery, and - in response - provide the user with a more exciting space in the next room. The application should be evaluated in a simple user study.

In their seminal paper Wiener et al. (2009) defined the taxonomy of human wayfinding tasks. The taxonomy is based on the type of knowledge possessed by the navigator. However, it did not differentiate between any subcategories of the "Path Following" task. In other words, according to the taxonomy, there is no difference between (a) knowing your route without knowing anything about the wider surrounding enviornment, and (b) knowing your route AND knowing about the wider surrounding enviornment.

Schwering et al. (2017) argued that there are substantial differences between such two tasks and that they deserve to be distinguished in an updated taxonomy.

The goal of this thesis will be to test the hypothesis that following the same route, with the same knowledge about the route, is a cognitively different task depending on whether the navigator has, or does not have, survey knowledge about the broader envionment.

Wiener, J. M., Büchner, S. J., & Hölscher, C. (2009). Taxonomy of human wayfinding tasks: A knowledge-based approach. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 9(2), 152–165.

Schwering, A., Krukar, J., Li, R., Anacta, V. J., & Fuest, S. (2017). Wayfinding Through Orientation. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 17(4), 273–303. doi:10.1080/13875868.2017.1322597

Eye-tracking is a common method for studying the usability of buildings and spatial behaviour in buildings. Many of such studies are conducted in Virtual Reality: either on desktop computers or in head-mounted displays. However, this is a problem because the field of view and head movement in such set-ups is greatly restricted. This might affect what people do or do not see when navigating a building, especially if important information is visible in the periphery of their visual field.

In this thesis you will try to answer the question: What visual information in the periphery do participants of VR experiments miss when navigating a building?

You will compare two groups of people: one group navigating the real building, and the other group navigating the virtual replica of GEO1. You will analyse the eye-tracking data and compare it across the two conditions. The virtual replica of GEO1 is provided.

Navigation is usually studied either completely outdoors or completely indoors. But our real-life wayfinding is different - we continuously enter and exit buildings without feeling that this is now a completely different experience.

The goal of this thesis is to understand what happens when people exit/enter buildings - how their navigation changes, and how technology can embrace the difference between these two contexts.

This can be approached from two perspectives.

From the technological perspective it is possible to design a prototype navigation system that---assuming indoor localisation is possible---works indoors and outdoors, and changes its behaviour depending on this context.

From the research perspective it can be investigated how human navigation changes when people enter or exit buildings. This can be studied for instance with a mobile eye-tracking, by asking experiment participants to move indoors/outdoors and analysing how eye-tracking measures vary between these two contexts.

Krukar and van Eek. (2019). The Impact of Indoor / Outdoor Context on Smartphone Interaction During Walking.

"Replication" refers to the process of re-creating an experiment published by other researchers in an effort of obtaining results pointing to the same conclusion. A "replication crisis" showed that many published research is not replicable. We can distinguish two types of replication:

- an "exact replication" is the attempt of recreating every detail of the original experiment

- a "conceptual replication" is the attempt of creating a similar experiment, with similar hypotheses, but perhaps with a different stimuli, instructions, or groups of participants.

This thesis focuses on a "conceptual replication" of navigation research.

Navigation research is usually performed in very specific spatial context (such as the city in which the paper's authors are based or the virtual environment that they have created). This introduces a challenge to generalizability and replicability of navigation research because we do not know whether classic research findings would be equally applicable in different spatial contexts (e.g., a different city).

This thesis focuses on replicating an existing wayfinding paper (to be chosen by the student) in Münster, or in a virtual environment available at ifgi.

The key challenge is finding a way to make the new spatial context (of Münster) comparable to that of the original paper.

Thesis co-supervised by Daniel Nüst (with technical support w.r.t. replicability).

Examples of papers that can be replicated:

https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.963131

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.005