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Navigation in a complex indoor environment can be difficult, and pedestrians may find themselves disoriented. As the featured objects of an environment, indoor landmarks play an important role in navigation. A review of the existing literature in outdoor landmark evaluation methods, however, shows that they cannot be fully applicable in any indoor environment. In this paper, an instance-based scoring system is proposed for analyzing the indicators that influence the salience of spatial objects from visual, semantic and structural aspects. An Analytic Hierarchy Process was applied to calculate landmark weights using these indicators. Two types of indoor scenes were employed as instances to verify the validity of this method, the Dongchenghui shopping mall (Nanjing, China) using a subjective questionnaire and interview method, and the headquarters of Masaryk University (Brno, Czechia) using an objective eyetracking method. Be result of the two instances showed that the proposed method was feasible.

This work addresses the impact of a geovisualization&rsquo, s level of realism on a user&rsquo, s experience in indoor navigation. The key part of the work is a user study in which participants navigated along a designated evacuation route previously learnt in a virtual tour or traditional 2D floor plan. The efficiency and effectiveness of completing the task was measured by the number of incorrect turns during navigation and completion time. The complexity of mental spatial representations that participants developed before and after navigating the route was also evaluated. The data was obtained using several qualitative and quantitative research methods (mobile eye tracking, structured interviews, sketching of cognitive maps, creation of navigation instructions, and additional questions to evaluate spatial orientation abilities). A total of 36 subjects (17 in the &ldquo, floor plan&rdquo, group and 19 in the &ldquo, virtual tour&rdquo, group) participated in the study. The results showed that the participants from both groups were able to finish the designated navigation route, but more detailed mental spatial representations were developed by the &ldquo, group than the &ldquo, group. The participants in the virtual tour group created richer navigation instructions both before and after evacuation, mentioned more landmarks and could recall their characteristics. Visual landmark characteristics available in the virtual tour also seemed to support the correct decision-making.