Paulo Raposo
Anthropological research has found that people typically prefer landscapes that visually afford greater amounts of spatial information; open vistas displaying features such as bodies of water, mountains, and vegetation, are found to be pleasing, while others like dense forests in which the distance is occluded by nearby trees are less so. Most of these studies have used photographs of places, but have not involved precise geographic or morphometric analysis of the places involved.
Spherical, 360° 1-minute videos have been taken at a diversity of sites in eastern Tennessee that variously fit the descriptions in the anthropological literature of favourable and unfavourable sites. A LiDAR point cloud was collected at each site as well. We will invite human participants to view a series of these spherical videos using a VR headset (an HTC Vive Pro Eye). Participants will be asked to give their ranked preferences of scenes.
In addition to running a series of human participant experiments in the laboratory with VR, thesis work will involve the calculation and analysis of various topographic "landscape parameters" from the point clouds and high-resolution DEMs using GIS (e.g., topographic openness, viewshed size, etc.). It will also involve running statistical tests on the relationship between these metrics and rates of preference for a given landscape.
This research will examine whether there is a relationship between people's landscape preferences and the local morphometry of those places. It will examine whether there is a correlation between preference and measurable physical quantities such as viewshed, topography, and distance.
Kaplan, R., & Herbert, E. J. (1987). Cultural and Sub-Cultural Comparisons in Preferences for Natural Settings. Landscape and Urban Planning, 14, 281–293.
Yokoyama, R., Shirasawa, M., & Pike, R. J. (2002). Visualizing Topography by Openness: A New Application of Image Processing to Digital Elevation Models. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 68(3), 257–265.
Raposo, P., & Brewer, C. A. (2014). Landscape Preference and Map Readability in Design Evaluation of Topographic Maps with an Orthoimage Background. The Cartographic Journal, 51(1), 25–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1743277412Y.0000000027