Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

Abstract

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns.

Understanding Public Evaluation

“…These include usage logs, video and audio recordings, participant observation, on-the-street interviews, and overt or covert observation. There are a range of techniques for analysing these data streams, for example pedestrian tracking [36], f-formations [19], and the audience funnel framework [22].…”

“…The GlobalFestival [35] information display was evaluated completely through video analysis, combining automatic pedestrian tracking [36] with detailed manual analysis of interactive segments. The Tourist Planner [21] table top display was evaluated using a combination of overt observation (first phase of study) and covert observation (second phase of study) through video data.…”

“…The pedestrian data was generated using open source pedestrian tracking software [36]. Figure 6 visualises how the display disrupts the pedestrian traffic in the walkway, with many passers-by walking behind the display or giving a wider berth in front.…”

Exploring the Use of Virtual Environments in an Industrial Site Design Process

“…Inspired by the work on visual presentations of real world user flows presented by Williamson & Williamson [30], we aimed to present similar visualizations for a virtual environment. Figure 7 presents a top-down view of the virtual environment indicating the paths taken by users.…”

People Watcher

“…Most comparable to this work is that of Williamson & Williamson [23] who introduce a video based system to track the movements of users around a public display. While their system automatically traces user movement around the display it fails to provide any user interface to support the real time observation of user behavior around the interface in question.…”