Wayfinding: a method for the empirical evaluation of structural saliency using 3D Isovists

Abstract

The presence of locations that possess distinct spatial-cognitive features (salient landmarks) is a fundamental necessity for supporting navigation. Embedding formal or structural variability sufficient to create such landmark locations is therefore an important consideration in the design of large urban and architectural spaces. Despite the availability of diverse theories that seek to identify the characteristics of 'a salient landmark', relatively few experimental techniques are available to empirically evaluate saliency in a given architecture plan. This study is therefore motivated by the development of an ability to measure spatial distinctiveness during the architectural design and modelling process. The information from such an analysis can prove useful for evaluating the way in which a design provides support for wayfinding and spatial appeal. Statistical summaries obtained from the three-dimensional (3D) isovists are compared using principal component analysis to differentiate monotonous regions from the more structurally distinct ones. The experiments reported in the paper demonstrate novel utilization of the isovist concept to capture spatial properties and comparison of structural saliency among two well-known architectural designs. Central contributions of the paper include the novel experimentation technique of capturing and utilizing 3D isovists, its interpretation and the quantitative methodology behind saliency computation.

Lived spaceandgeometric space: comparing people’s perceptions of spatial enclosure and exposure with metric room properties and isovist measures

“…In particular, internal prospect was not considered in the present study and it has rarely been examined in past research. For examining internal prospect, threedimensional isovist or spatial salience measures (Fisher-Gewirtzman et al 2003;Bhatia et al, 2013) may be more useful. Additionally secondary elements of a test environment could also be varied to determine if they influence perceptions.…”

“…However, it also limits the usefulness of some isovist measures. Second, despite recent developments in three-dimensional visibility analysis (Yang, Putra, and Li 2007;Morello and Ratti 2009;Bhatia, Chalup, and Ostwald 2013), most isovist studies investigate the visual experience of space only in two dimensions. In this paper two-dimensional measures are used for the correlation analysis, although they are examined in both plan and section.…”

Value of urban views in a bay city: Hedonic analysis with the spatial multilevel additive regression (SMAR) model

“…A conventional isovist analysis evaluates views in a two dimensional (2D) space, and therefore one of the limitations of the conventional isovist analysis is ignorance of the third dimension (i.e., height)-capturing only a 2D horizontal slice of human perception (Yu, Han, & Chai, 2007;Yang, Putra, & Li, 2007). Note that, recently, some extensions that cope with this problem have been proposed (e.g., Bhatia, Chalup, & Ostwald, 2013;Morello & Ratti, 2009). On the other hand, the viewshed analysis tries to quantify a three dimensional (3D) view by examining whether each cell in a 3D raster is visible or not from an observation point.…”

Walking in the cities without ground, how 3d complex network volumetrics improve analysis

“…Spatial analysis Software implementation (Benedikt, 1979) House I & O Not disclosed (Conroy & Dalton, 2001) Tate Omnivista (Batty, 2001) Urban, Tate StarLogo House, Tate VGA Not disclosed (Turner & Penn, 2002)** Tate VGA EVA/Dephtmap 1,2 *** Urban VGA Proprietary (Wiener & Franz, 2005) Gallery VGA Anavis (Wiener, et al, 2007) Gallery VGA Anavis (Yang, et al, 2007) Urban GIS (Derix & Gamlesaeter, 2008) Urban Proprietary (Parvin, et al, 2008) Urban, I & O VGA Depthmap 2 (Morello & Ratti, 2009) Urban Not disclosed (Meilinger, et al, 2012) Urban VGA Ajanachara (Bhatia, et al, 2013) House, I & O Sketchup (Suleiman, et al, 2013) Urban Matlab/GIS (Koltsova, et al, 2013) Urban Rhino (Fisher-Gewirtzman, et al, 2013) Urban Not disclosed (Varoudis & Psarra, 2014) Office Sketchup (Conroy & Dalton N, 2015) (Chang & Park, 2018) Urban TVA (Lu, et al, 2019) Urban or Indoor ArcGIS (Kim, et al, 2019) Urban ArcGIS 3D Pro (Krukar, et al, 2020) Indoor various Not disclosed…”