Considering people’s affective responses to environments
Georg Gartner
Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Humans perceive and evaluate environments subjectively and affectively. Some places are experienced as unsafe, while some others as attractive and interesting. These affective responses to environments influence people’s daily behavior and decision-making in space, e.g., choosing which route to take, or which place to visit. This paper investigates how people’s affective responses to environments can be used to enhance computer-based route planning. More specifically, we explore a crowdsourcing approach to model and collect people’s affective responses to space. An Affect-Space-Model and a mobile application are developed to facilitate this crowdsourcing approach. A routing algorithm (named AffectRoute) is then proposed to aggregate and integrate the collected data for route planning. Evaluation with human participants show that the routes generated by considering people’s affective responses to environments are significantly preferred over the conventional shortest ones, which are employed in car navigation systems and many online route planners, such as those in Google Maps and Bing Maps. This approach can be integrated into route planning services to provide users with more satisfying routing results.

Close Window