• 1. Navigation
  • 1.1. Navigation
    • 1.1.1. What is Navigation?
    • 1.1.2. Why Navigation?
    • 1.1.3. Space Perception
    • 1.1.4. Navigation Tools
    • 1.1.5. Unit-Summary
  • 1.2. Multimedia Navigation
  • 1.3. Thematic Navigation
  • 1.4. Temporal Navigation
  • 1.5. Spatial Navigation
  • 1.6. Self Assessment
  • 1.7. Summary
  • 1.8. Glossary
  • 1.9. Bibliography
  • 1.10. Metadata

1.1.2. Why Navigation?

Can you tell where the red dot in the image below is located?

Where is the red point?

Even if you knew that the point is located in Switzerland, you would not guess the right location, because there are too few hints (cities, lakes, borders, etc.) that would help to guess the right location.

Click here to see the solution! (Click here for more information)

Where is the red point?

Do you now know where the red point is situated?

It is near Chur which is the capital city of the canton Grisons in Switzerland.
Supposed you know well the country Switzerland, it is now, when seeing the entire country, easy to guess the right location of the red point. But supposed you do not know Switzerland at all, you still would not know where the red point is located. Perhaps, you would only guess that the red point is in Switzerland.

The presented example of not knowing where we are is not only relating to spatial information but also for multimedia applications in general such as web sites etc. We will discuss these topics in the next unit. We first want to give you an overview of navigation in the real space.

Update: 26.1.2012 (eLML) - Contact - Print (PDF) - © CartouCHe 2004-2007 (Creative Commons) - layout based on YAML