Walking in the Shade: Shadow-oriented Navigation for Pedestrians

Feng, Y., Zhang, P., Xue, J., Chen, Z., & Meng, L. (2024, October). Walking in the Shade: Shadow-oriented Navigation for Pedestrians. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (pp. 677-680).

Abstract

Excessive exposure to the sun and the resulting heat poses health risks to pedestrians in hot weather. To mitigate these risks, we propose a shadow-oriented navigation system that offers cooler and more convenient walking routes by simulating shadows. Our system integrates a manually corrected pedestrian network from OpenStreetMap with LoD2 3D city models, using a ray tracing module for real-time shadow simulation. It optimizes routes to be either cooler or shorter based on user preferences, with easy verification through 3D scene visualization. Our navigation system has been implemented in a study area in Munich, Germany, with further discussions on the technical feasibility and challenges of extending it to larger areas.