Turner, A; (2006) Isovists, occlusions and the exosomatic visual architecture. In: Richter, K and Rà etschi, U, (eds.) The Cognitive Approach to Modeling Environments (CAME'06). (pp. 17-21). Universität Freiburg

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Abstract

Recently, simulation agents (or animats) using an exosomaticvisual architecture (EVA) have been shown to correlate well with ob-served pedestrian movement in both building and urban environments.An EVA uses a grid overlaid on a two-dimensional plan of a system torecord the locations visible from the current grid square. The agents areallowed to roam freely in the environment, and lookup visual informationfrom the EVA in order to guide them through the plan. This allows manyagents to navigate concurrently using visibility relationships. However,while good correlation between observed physical and virtual systemshas been shown, experiments to date have been based on agents whichmove stochastically to visible locations. This leads to them congregatingin large open vistas, where there are more visible locations. In contrast,when people are observed, they tend to follow the edges of spaces tomove or take direct routes across open spaces to the far side. Here wehypothesize that rather than using open space to guide them, people in-stead use the visual clue of an occluding edge to indicate where furthermovement potential may lie. We supplement the information in the EVAwith details of the isovist at each location, to supply the locations ofoccluding edges from each grid square. We show that these new agentsfollow paths much more similar to observed pedestrians using an openspace. We speculate that the invariance of the occlusion points within aplan may thus lead to an economic skeletal mapping of the environment,and possible basis for a cognitive map.

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