The sound navigation system at Montparnasse station

There are few information at French railway station. People have to take attention to the visual sign to get the information of train departure time, corridor number, change the train etc. However, some stations of SNCF, which is the national railway company, are very large and have many lines, for instance, TGV, domestic, international line, so that it takes long time to find the right way to corridor. Some people seem to lose their ways while they are moving at the station. Then we thought that it was necessary to make the sound navigation system not to lose the way, and passengers were smoothly guided to their right destinations. Before this experiment, some research had been done to find the problem at the station, and we got the conclusion that people felt difficult to go to another place from main platform. From these researches, we chose one place for the sound installation, which was the passage from main platform to another platform at Montparnasse station in Paris. This reason was that people had to use the long moving walkway for three times, there were some exits on this way, and they could not see the destination because another platform was upper stair. After recording and analyzing the ambient sound of the station, we made some three types of sounds that were Attention, Feedback, and Time-line. Attention and Feedback sounds tell us the right way, and Time-line sound tells us the distance to the destination. 30 subjects selected the sound that went well with the sound navigation system in the laboratory. The highest score sounds were installed at the actual station, and the evaluation experiment was conducted. Consequently, some problems have been improved.