Form Follows Brain Function: A Computational Mapping Approach

Abstract

The strong association between computation and the built environment gives birth to new research approaches to urban design. Although these approaches enable the implementation of urban systems based on various collections of datasets, they usually neglect human experience. To address this problem, our research identifies and quantifies spatial information and patterns of urban organization based on experience, by gathering two parallel types of user data: sensory and recollection. The presented experiment, executed in Copenhagen, Denmark with 23 participants, involves a walking task, and a recollection task. The walking task is 1 km walk from the Copenhagen Court House building to the Royal Danish Theatre through Strøget Street, while wearing eye-tracking spectacles. The recollection task includes the underlining – on a 3D photorealistic digital model – of the elements that the participants can recall from their walk. We monitor the eye movement of the participants to locally characterize the urban path by computing four spatial attributes: a) The fixations on elements (counted through iMotions Software), b) The distance from the viewer (taken by GPS points through FUMapp software), c) The position of the stimuli related to the eye-level (calculated in FUMapp), and d) The degree of spatial transformations on street intersections (through spatial variables in FUMapp). Then we compare the eye-tracking and the recollection data and we evaluate their heat maps. The originality of this research is twofold: First, for the first time a substantial amount of quantifiable optical data related to urban walking is recorded; Second, for the first time this experiment is performed on the public street. The proposed method could offer a quantifiable basis for predicting eye fixation locations, determining human centric guidelines for urban design. Additional modes of body sensors could yield even more all-encompassing body-metrics related to the urban walking experience.