Our new paper is out in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science: 3D environments require 3D visualisations: the limitations of 2D sketch maps in capturing spatial knowledge

An interactive landing page with all data and a summary of results is available here.

What we found: Participants navigated two types of vertically-complex environments and drew both 2D (pen-and-paper) and 3D (VR) sketch maps. We coded the occurrence and correctness of qualitative spatial relations across all three dimensions.

Key results:

• When given 2D pen-and-paper, participants omitted a large amount of (mainly vertical) spatial information that they did in fact encode in memory.
• When given a 3D VR sketch mapping tool, they externalised more vertical relations while maintaining comparable correctness.
• The bottleneck is the 2D medium itself, not participants’ spatial knowledge. This has methodological implications for navigation research, architectural cognition, and GIS.

A big thank you to all collaborators. This paper is part of the 3D Sketch Maps project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Our paper “A Spatial Signature for the In-Between: Characterising Indoor-Outdoor Transitional Interface Through Space Syntax Measures” has been accepted to the 15th Space Syntax Symposium (SSS), exploring the spatial logic of transitional interfaces through a unified VGA framework. Using a controlled parametric study, we demonstrate that the intermediate zone between interior and exterior environments exhibit a distinct syntactic signature that is differentiable from both indoor and outdoor spaces. The paper is co-authored by Jung-Won, Marina, Panos, and Jakub, as part of our DFG–ANR-funded project “In-and-Out: A Cognitively-Grounded Integration of Indoor and Outdoor Spatial Computing.” Jung-Won will be presenting this work at SSS 2026. Congrats!

Having graduated from the University of Muenster in Germany, Maximilian Elfers joins SPARC as a PhD candidate. Welcome Maxi!

Having graduated from Lund University in Sweden, Tilda is visting SPARC for 3 months within the Erasmus+ Internship programme. Tilda comes from an architectural background and is here to research anticipations of a building’s internal layout based on external cues (facade). Welcome Tilda!

SPARC and Human-Centered Interior Environment Lab led by Prof. Ji Young Cho at Kyung Hee University in Seoul have received joint funding from the German Research Foundation and the National Research Foundation of Korea. The project is titled “Measuring mental representations of complex 3D structures for wayfinding: bringing together geoinformatics Virtual Reality tools and domain-specific psychometric spatial ability tests” and will involve mutual research visits of 3-4 weeks (Jakub in Seoul, Ji Young in Münster) over the upcoming year.

Jakub was invited to give a talk at the training school of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie-UKRI Doctoral Network - “SCALA – Spatial Communication and Ageing across Languages”. The group of 16 Doctoral Candidates and their supervisors investigates how spatial communication happens across languages, age groups, and how technology can affect it. The training school was hosted in Florence, Italy at the beautiful historical building of the Montedomini Training Center. The building was sufficiently confusing to practically demonstrate the need for this line of research.

The talk sumarised the output of the 3D Sketch Maps project, as an example of how technology (in this case, VR and AR) can assist people in expressing and communicating complex spatial information.

New paper, “Interpreting Architectural Drawings: The Role of Gaze and Gestures in Cognitive Offloading”, now published in Applied Cognitive Psychology (open access), coming out of the PhD thesis of Yesol Park at ETH Zürich.

It shows how architects use gaze and hand gestures as complementary strategies to offload spatial thinking - across two different interpretation tasks and types of building layouts. Abstract layouts invite exploratory looking and representational gestures; detailed layouts foster focal attention and deictic pointing.

Really loved this comment from the reviewer: “All in all, this is exactly the kind of research I would like to see more of: investigations into practical problems using a sound theoretical basis and sophisticated methods.” - this is exactly the kind of research I love doing.

Open-access paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.70127

Our new 3-year project on linking walking trajectories and eye-movement trajectories has been funded by the German Research Foundation. Project SPACE-EYE: Spatial and Architectural Evidence from Movement-aware Eye-tracking will combine mobile eye-tracking and motion data to build a computational framework that models gaze and locomotion together (…of course in realistic architectural settings).

This has implications for areas interested in modelling how people move through and view space, e.g. in signage planning, or emergency evacuation scenarios.

The project will welcome a fully-funded PhD student for 3 years.