Entries Tagged Maps

I saw Steve’s link to this very interesting work on transportation maps. All I can say is wow, this is great!

Some maps Diane sent to help us think about text-based maps. She said:

I have faxed several maps to you. Eastern Alamance High School is a series of buildings connected by covered sidewalks. On my map, the buildings are shaded yellow. The section with X and circles (bushes) is the outside courtyard. There is a map of Northgate Mall (Durham). I have a poor map of GMS. The last map is a street map of the area around GMS. The numbers on this map correspond with restaurants (see last page).

Interesting looking book on text adventure and interactive fiction.

Library or Amazon.

Interactive fiction — the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure — has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it.

Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that produced by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration.

Americo studied the floorplans for Sitterson and verified them by examination while producing a description of each place in the building. I built a simple prototype web server but I’m unsatisfied with its dependence on coordinates and the resulting difficulty of sorting the links in hallways into a reasonable order.

Can I specify the links in a way that makes them relative to one another and allows correct sorting? For example in a hallway, if you’re coming out of a door and turning right, all the doors on that hall that are on the same side as the door you came out of, will be on your right. If you turn left, all the doors on the same side will be on your left.

Could a blind person enter data specified in this way?

How about doors that are across from other doors. Can we capture that information? In a hallway it makes lots of sense. But how about in a larger room? Are the walls ordered? Do we need anything more than to walk around the room?

Looking at the floorplan above. Suppose I start at the elevator and turn right into the elevator lobby, I encounter 339, then the west hallway, the south stairwell, 340, and back the elevator. So, I explored this space. Is this sufficient? Should I have recorded the turns? See below.

In the west hallway, I’d come to R338 and the south hall on my left, R336-L337 R335-L334 R333 L332 R(w stair lobby)-L(center hall) L331 R329-L330 L328 R327 (N hall). Because this space is narrow, I don’t have to back track to explore it but it is important that I start from the very end. So in the north hallway I’ll actually turn right to go the end and then turn around and come back, passing the west hall on the way. That way I know where it fits among the rooms.

In the north hall: R325-L326 L(w hall) R324 L323-R319 L322 L(320 hall) R318 R317 L(315 hall) L313 R316-L312 R311 L(e hall) R310-L309

Could record distance between doors too.

Now suppose I come out of room 329 into the west hallway and I want to list the rooms in a natural order. Looking at the list above I find R329-L330. This means 329 was on the right, with 330 on the left across from it. So I can describe the links something like this:
Ahead: 330
Right: 328 on left, 327 on right, North Hall.
Left: 331 on right, center hallway on right, w stair lobby on left, 332 on right, 333 on left, 334 on right, 335 on left, 337 on R, 336 on L, s hall on R, 338 on L, elevator lobby.

So, it would seem that I can get the links in the right order simply by finding the place I am coming from in the list of places and noting its side. For a right side origination, you go right by working forward in the list, and left by working backward through the list. For a left side room, I think it would be just the opposite. Let’s try that. Suppose I’m coming out of 330 into the w hall. Looking in the list above for the w hall I find 330. I can order the links like:
Ahead: 329
Right: 331R (center hall)R (w stair lobby)L 332R 333L 334R 335L 337R 336L (s hall)R 338L, elevator lobby.
Left: 328L 327R (N hall).
Cool! This seems to work fine.

If you’re going with the list, you keep the sides, if you’re going against the list you reverse the sides.

About Rooms

Now what to do about rooms with multiple doors? If you walk around the perimeter noting the side where you encounter rooms, then I could sort them using the same method as above. But surely you want to know about changes of direction. Otherwise it might seem like all the doors are in a long row instead of wrapping around an area. For example consider the section of the 2nd floor below:

If you walk around that area, say with your right hand on the wall you come to R225 R223 R221 R220, etc. Maybe it should be something like: L224 R225 R223 TurnLeft R221 R220 R219 A(North Hallway) TurnLeft R294 A218 TurnLeft TurnRight R224 A(East Hall).

Suppose you come out of 218. Finding it in the list above I can see that going straight I’ll encounter 294 on the left. There is some ambiguity about what comes next. The next thing backward in the list is the TurnLeft but it could easily swap with the A(North Hallway). I’d like to say 294 on left, (north hall) on the left, Turn right, etc. Will this be too confusing? Maybe the links could read like this?

Entering 284 from 218.
Ahead: 294 left, N hall left
Then turn right for 219 left, 220 left, 221 left
Then turn right for 223 left, 225 left, 224 right and the east hall ahead
Turning right: 225 A, then turning right, 224 left, east hall ahead

It seems like I’m trying to pack too much in. But if you’re going to find 221 from 218 you’d like information about what you’d pass getting there.

Maybe I should name the walls? Diane does that. Suppose we name them for compass directions. Suppose also we differentiate hall-like spaces from room-like spaces. In halls you can touch both walls, in rooms you can’t. So 224 isn’t included in 284 because 224 is still in the hall.

Entering 284 from 218 on the south wall.
On the west wall (immediately on your left): 294 and north hall.
On the south wall (to your right): east hall.
On the north wall (across the room): 219L 229L 221L
On the east wall (to your right 20 feet): 223R 225R

Maybe this is too detailed but I think it is all useful information.

What about the doors to the restrooms facing opposite directions? Should I try to capture that?

I got an email and phone call from Rachel Magario, a blind geography graduate student at the University of Kansas. She is interested in maps for people who are blind and is specifically interested in making an accessible map of her campus. She wants something like BATS embedded in the browser. I explained to her how hard that would be with the poor support for sound and non-existent support for tactile feedback in browsers.

I encouraged her to think about what you can do with web pages in browsers rather than trying to reproduce our BATS system. This got me to thinking about maps, spatial relationships, web links, etc. This page is an attempt to summarize that thinking.

When we think about presenting maps to people who are blind, we immediately think about ways to modify the traditional visual representation to make it accessible. In BATS we used a cursor to represent the user’s position on a 2D map. We played spatial sound for objects near the user’s location and allowed them to make queries about their current location and to hear the names of objects that are nearby in any direction. It was simply a transformation of the visual map into a virtual sound world that allows local queries. The experience for the user must be something like it would be for a sighted person who was only allowed to see a tiny part of the map at any one time.

Web browsers are good at presenting text, images, and simple sounds connected to other pages by links. This reminds me of the old text adventure games. The game consists of a number of locations that are described using text. You interact with the game and move from one location to another by entering text commands like “North”, “East”, or “Enter Jail”. Each new location has a description. You explore this world, collecting treasure and solving puzzles. They were lots of fun and I see there are audio enabled versions so blind people can play the games.

If we focus on the relationships that are embodied in the map rather than trying to present everything spatially perhaps we could make useful maps that can be embedded in conventional web pages. It seems to me this could apply to a building (a school), a campus, or parts of a city. I don’t see how to apply it to an entire state, but perhaps if the links were roads something interesting could be done.

I may try to put together a few pages to experiment with how it might work.

The map is a collection of nodes that describe spaces and pathways that connect nodes together. The nodes could simply be web pages. Node pages might include:

• An overview and introduction to the space.
• A sample sound, perhaps by user preference this could play automatically or not.
• A list of pathways (web links), with some possibly distinguished as exits (to Phillips or to Columbia) and others linking to other internal spaces (either 1st floor door).
• An up link that goes to a summary node that describes the space more generally (for Sitterson this could be a description of the building and the computer science department, perhaps with links to the department web page)
• A list of features of the space (the front desk might be a feature of the Sitterson lobby)
• A list of hazards of the space to be avoided (the columns or the stairs down to the lower lobby).

Activating a pathway link might, by user preference, activate a transition page that actually describes that route or it might simply go to the next space. So with transitions on after clicking on the pathway link for the western door to the 1st floor you might hear “You walk about 10 paces south to the door. There is a card reader here for after hours entry. You open the door and enter the 1st floor west hallway”. With transitions off clicking on the link simply starts with the page for the 1st floor west hallway.

We could have multiple nodes describing a large space like the lobby or a single large page divided into sections with internal anchors. Is the front desk a node? Or simply a feature. Perhaps the various displays are internal nodes so that they can be described later. Perhaps anything can become a node. Or perhaps it would be better to distinguish spaces from their content. In this model only spaces would be nodes that can be navigated to. Others are simply attached descriptions of features. Since users of screen readers can easily stop reading a paragraph and skip to the next, the descriptive text might simply be embedded in the page.

Perhaps we can devise a consistent set of access keys on the web pages to allow users to easily skip to the part of the page that interests them most.