Effect Of Color Brightness Variation And Guiding Signs On Wayfinding In The Underground Parking Garage

The popularity of family cars in the past decade has brought a lot of convenience to everyone,and at the same time gave birth to the underground parking garage.Due to the undesirable lighting conditions and the lacking of sense of direction in it,underground parking garage often causes the driver to have greater difficulty in finding his/her car.Although underground parking garage tend to use a series of guiding signs nowadays,it still fails to bring about an ideal user experience.According to the existing research,the guiding system and spot number of many underground parking garages are not only difficult to determine the spatial orientation,but also difficult to identify the target parking spot.Therefore,research and design a reasonable and effective way of information prompt to remind the driver of the spatial layout of the parking spots can not only eliminate the problem of easy to get lost,but also provide clear guidance for the need to find a specific parking spot and reduce the difficulty of searching for the parking space.In this study,the role of hue partition as cues and brightness as spots’ distribution cues in underground parking garage navigation is discussed.On the basis of controlling the hue cue of the parking garage partition,the difference and distance of the brightness are further manipulated to investigate the efficiency of the subjects’ search for the target parking spot.Two experiments adopt virtual reality(VR)technology to build virtual parkins sarage,subjects were 56 college students.Experiment 1 was designed with two factors:2(brightness difference cue:exist,not exist)×4(distance:distance 1,distance 2,distance 3,distance 4).The results show that under any distance condition,the brightness difference cue adding to different columns which already with hue as partition cue can effectively provide users with parking spots distribution and improve the speed of finding target parking spot.Experiment 2 based on the experiment 1,further investigate the effect of guiding signs.The research experiment was designed as a three-factor experiment:(brightness difference cue:exist,not exist)×2(guiding signs:exist,not exist)× 4(distance:distance 1,distance 2,distance 3 and distance 4).The results show that both cues and signs can provide the the participants with information of parking spots distribution,but there is no significant interaction between those two.Synthesize two research indicates that the color’s brightness difference as a cue can well navigate drivers and provide the parking spots distribution in the underground parking garage.