Background: This article offers an alternative look at the experiential character of the built environment by combining objective analysis and subjective perception. The aim is to measure and elaborate on quantitative descriptions of 'hidden' urban characteristics, attempting to build correlations between different unseen but detectable qualities of cities. Methods: The study introduces an applied research method to quantify objective features of the built environment and the related subjective experience, prototyping a mobile phone application that both actively and passively measures urban parameters and human perceptions. To test the validity of the research process, a few experiments were performed in Cambridge, MA mapping out a series of different places. Results: The implementation of the application data in conjunction with the more passive, objective dataset extracted from complementary sensors, resulted in an alternative understanding of everyday spatial interactions and in a taxonomy of urban conditions-revealing the 'mood' of urban environments. Conclusions: The combination of objective and subjective datasets can help reveal more comprehensive insights and characters of spaces and places within the city, mediating between technology and the built environment and leveraging emotive perceptions of the urban actors in order to influence and inform design decisions.
INVIVIA corp. / Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA http://iam.tugraz.at/ Tracking in space is an important bridge between physical and virtual environments. Optical 3D motion capture systems have become standards in the special effects industry and are increasingly common in medical applications, as well as in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) set-ups. Beyond these applications, there are a number of emerging uses for such systems in architectural design. The possibility to track complex movements in space in real time and at high precision can open up new modes of interacting with spaces, and of generating movement as form as part of an architectural design process. What makes these possibilities particularly interesting for architectural investigations is that they don't have to be limited to a single user, but can happen in a collaborative way, involving many users simultaneously. After briefly explaining the technical aspects of the technology, an overview of such emerging uses is discussed. As an illustration of this potential, the results of a recent workshop are presented, in which a group of architecture students explored the hidden beauty of everyday movements and turned them into sculptural objects.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.