Embodied 3D isovists: A method to model the visual perception of space

Jakub Krukar,Charu Manivannan,Carl Schultz,Mehul Bhatt

doi:10.1177/2399808320974533

Jakub Krukar, Charu Manivannan + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808320974533

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Abstract

Isovist analysis has been typically applied for the study of human perception in indoor built-up spaces. Albeit predominantly in 2D, recent works have explored isovist techniques in 3D. However, 3D applications of isovist analysis simply extrapolate the assumptions of its 2D counterpart, without questioning whether these assumptions remain valid in 3D. They do not: because human perception is embodied, the perception of vertical space differs from the perception of horizontal space. We present a user study demonstrating that an embodied 3D isovist that accounts for this phenomenon (formalised based on the notion of spatial artefacts) predicts human perception of space more accurately than the generic volumetric 3D isovist, specifically with respect to spaciousness and complexity. We suggest that the embodied 3D isovist should be used for 3D analyses in which human perception is of key interest.

Highlights

An isovist is defined as the set of all points visible from the given vantage point in space
We investigate the concept of the embodied 3D isovist, a type of spatial artefact (Bhatt et al, 2012) that adopts richer notions of 3D visibility by distinguishing semantic perceptual-locomotive sub-regions of the generic volumetric 3D isovist (Bhatt et al, 2012, 2014; Bhatt and Freksa, 2015; Krukar et al, 2017)
That the embodied 3D isovist will be a more accurate predictor of human perception, i.e. that the statistical model that considers embodied 3D isovist metrics as predictors will result in a better fit to the experimental data than the otherwise identical model limited to the generic volumetric 3D isovist metrics

Summary

Introduction

An isovist is defined as the set of all points visible from the given vantage point in space. A direct extrapolation of the classic 2D method to the third dimension yields an isovist equivalent to the unweighted volume of geometrical space visually accessible from its vantage point ( on referred to as the volumetric 3D isovist). It is the position of this paper that such computation is an oversimplification of what isovists were originally intended to represent. That the embodied 3D isovist will be a more accurate predictor of human perception, i.e. that the statistical model that considers embodied 3D isovist metrics as predictors will result in a better fit to the experimental data than the otherwise identical model limited to the generic volumetric 3D isovist metrics

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Limitations and conclusion