Eye-tracking emulation software: a promising urban design tool

Abstract

The human brain is designed as a social engagement system hard-wired to take in and respond to other people. This study begins to explore how this hidden brain design also directs our engagement with the built environment, in this instance, determining our behaviour around buildings. Using eye-tracking emulation software, this study tracked the unconscious responses people have to new-urbanist and more typical, car-centric suburban American house facades (elevations). It found that this kind of emulation software can help demonstrate how new urbanist homes and streetscapes were implicitly easier for people to take in and focus on, than those in car-centric subdivisions. The implications of these findings are that urban designers and architects can employ eye-tracking emulation software to explore the ways that humans unconsciously handle visual stimuli, subject to validation from alternative data sources.