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.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• environmental psychology
• biometrics
• eye-tracking
• built environment
• human behaviour

Acknowledgements

We thank Rachel Herman, Kelly Sherman, and Elizabeth Kellam, research assistants at Tufts University, for their assistance with data collection; and we thank Devens Enterprise Commission for financial support. Also thanks to Kelly Canavan of 3M for helping to provide us with access to the VAS software.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We define ‘conventional developments’ as post-war housing developments that are car-centric, prioritizing drivers over pedestrians.

2 Researchers also aimed for even lighting, with minimal shadows, and no people, trees, cars or signs in the photos. However, for some photos this proved to be an impossible task. Some buildings were located in popular areas that were always filled with people. Other buildings had trees planted or cars parked directly in front of them, and a number had shadows that were unavoidable.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Devens Enterprise Commission.