Visual experience route planning for urban environments

Various route planning algorithms exist today in many location-based services. These algorithms aim to optimize a certain criterion, mostly the shortest path or the shortest travelled time from origin to destination. Urban routes are many times experienced and perceived differently by different users, or even perceived differently by the same user having a different purpose of travel. We argue that each route has unique spatial attributes and characteristics that may have a different influence on the pedestrians’ visual perception, where this can be used as a qualitative travel experience criterion to a specific user profile or specific user interest and objective. In this paper, we present a new route planning model, where we consider the user experience thorough visual perception, as an alternative to the default route calculation models that are mostly derived from parameters associated with the road network geometry and topology. The analysis is based on the interpretation of visibility calculations (via the aggregation of line of sights), namely what the pedestrian observes while walking along a path, representing the experiential attribute of the pedestrian. The foundation of this model is the ‘3DVA’ model, enabling disassembling the environment to all predefined visible components, such as building types, landmarks, urban functions, green areas, sky view and more. The frequency and magnitude of the visibility to specific element types, or a combination of visual elements (heterogeneity versus homogeneity) for a specific route, can indicate on a particular spatial experience that is unique to each of the analysed routes, resulting in recommending the route that has the maximum wanted effect on the user experience. Consequently, the route planning model can suggest tailored routes for specific user/pedestrian profiles, augmenting the existing route planning algorithms, and enriching the currently used location-based services.