Integrating ‘weighted views’ to quantitative 3D visibility analysis as a predictive tool for perception of space

Abstract

The ability to predict the human perception of space in dense urban environments would have a vast impact on planning and design processes. Many analytical models, methods and tools have been developed to describe and predict human perception and behaviour in the urban environment, and academic papers have addressed the issue of the view in urban environments as a significant variant influencing perception and quality of life. In the present paper, we introduce the integration of weighted views (the relative impact of a view on a viewer) in a 3D Line of Sight visibility analysis as a predictive tool for perceptions of space focusing on ‘perceived density’. The integration of subjective qualitative information with objective measurements of the volume of visible space may bring evaluations closer to human perceptions of space. The research background consists of state-of-the-art visibility analysis and research concerned with the impact of the view on perceptions of space. An experiment in a visualization laboratory explored the relative impact of various views on the ‘perceived density’ and ‘visual privacy’ of 100 participants. The relative weight of each view presented to the subjects was based on the statistical results of the experiment. The weights were integrated into the 3D Line of Sight visibility analysis and the model is applied in a case study. The integrated 3D Line of Sight visibility analysis currently runs with off-the-shelf software available to all practicing architects and planners. It is expected that in the near future, the tool developed in this work will become an important aid to all practitioners, the method becoming a valuable evaluation tool in planning and design processes. Considering design alternatives, it may become a stepping stone for design principles and regulations.

Three-dimensional visibility graph analysis and its application

“…Several studies have developed the 3D isovist algorithms and assessment tools (Fisher-Gewirtzman et al, 2003;Koltsova et al, 2013;Morello and Ratti, 2009;Suleiman et al, 2013). Some studies have examined the topics such as enclosures or openness (Fisher-Gewirtzman, 2016;Fisher-Gewirtzman, 2015;Shach-Pinsly et al, 2006;Stamps, 2005), visible sky (Yang et al, 2007), visible water (Fisher-Gewirtzman et al, 2005), pedestrians' visual experience in urban environments (Chamberlain and Meitner, 2013), or representation methods (Dalton and Dalton, 2015). Such studies have normally focused on various local properties of individual 3D isovists, including the size of visible sky, length of longest sight line, or distance to closest objects.…”

Three-Dimensional Gaze Projection Heat-Mapping of Outdoor Mobile Eye-Tracking Data

“…The resulting modes of analysis and visualizations created lack responsiveness to the integrated influence of mind, dynamic body, and spatial richness of the built environment; by dint of their construction, they are simply unable to fully make visible peoples' embodied engagement with their surroundings. This investigation seeks to address this by exploring how mobile eye-tracking data capturing pedestrian visual engagement with buildings along urban street edges can be visualized as three-dimen-their perception (Fisher-Gewirtzman, 2018). Such research has also taken an embodied turn, with a distinct focus on the eye-level situated perceiver (Emo, 2015;Krukar et al, 2017) and the space-time dynamics and motion of engagement within a real-world environment .…”

The Unequal Impact of Natural Landscape Views on Housing Prices: Applying Visual Perception Model and Quantile Regression to Apartments in Seoul

“…Two major groups of studies on landscape quantification have been performed. One concerned calculating the area of various objects that can be viewed using viewshed analysis [12,17,[38][39][40][41], and the other involved determining a visual perception using the spatial relationship between a specific target object and a viewpoint to determine the psychological effect of the target object on the observer [42][43][44][45][46][47]. The former group involved evaluating the landscape by calculating the planimetric area for each target object, although recent studies have improved the accuracy of the analysis by using more precise three-dimensional data [17,41].…”

“…By considering only the vertical view of an object, the entire view and visual perception are not appropriately integrated and analyzed [46]. Since the algorithm in [47] evaluated the landscape using the depth view obtained by projecting the view onto a cylinder, not a hemisphere, it was not able to evaluate the correct visual perception.…”