Recently, E-mail has come to be used widely as an information transmission means over the Internet. At times it is desired to send a route guidance map for pedestrian navigation along with the E-mail message. Such a map may be sent by a GIF or JPEG format image, which results in a large amount of data. Text symbol maps can be used which are small in size and easy to treat, but have the limitation that only a small set of text symbols can be used. In this paper, the authors propose a novel method of sending the pedestrian guide map in VRML format. Such VRML format maps can be sent in the body of the E-mail message, because the data is of a text form. The VRML format maps can also be sent as an attachment file of E-mail. This paper illustrates several VRML format maps to demonstrate their advantages. (A*)
Abstract