Two experiments are presented studying interrelations between spatial properties of environments and both experience and spatial behavior. In order to systematically study such interrelations, a generic description of space is required that provides comparability between arbitrarily shaped environments and captures behaviorally relevant properties of space. In this study the suitability of isov...

This paper briefly describes the software application OmniVista written for the Apple Macintosh Platform. OmniVista is essentially an isovist generating application, which uses the 2d plan of a building or urban environment as input data, and then can be used in one of three modal ways. Firstly, point isovists can be generated by ‘clicking’ onto any location in the environment. Secondly, all na...

The Spatial Positioning tool (SPOT) is an isovist-based spatial analysis software, and is written in Java working as a stand-alone program. SPOT differs from regular Space syntax software as it can produce integration graphs and intervisibility graphs from a selection of positions. The concept of the software originates from a series of field studies on building interiors highly influenced by o...

The space that can be seen from any vantage point is called an isovist and the set of such spaces forms a visual field whose extent defines different isovist fields based on different geometric properties. I suggest that our perceptions of moving within such fields might be related to these geometric properties. I begin with a formal representation of isovists and their fields, introducing simp...

In a series of exploratory experiments we investigated interrelations between structure and shape of architectural indoor spaces on the one hand, and affective experience and navigation behaviour on the other hand. For this, isovist-based descriptions of 16 virtual indoor scenes were correlated with behavioural data from the experimental tasks. For all tasks-two active navigation tasks and an i...

Isovists and isovist fields are of interest to space syntax in that they offer a way of addressing the relationship between the viewer and their immediate spatial environment, however, in the form described by Benedikt (Benedikt, 1979) they are essentially non-syntactic. All the measures he proposes and then plots as fields are locally defined, and are independent of the state of the field in o...

The pedestrian mobility is a way to understand how a person might experience the void in between the buildings (this void defines a space portion as a shape) and therefore the urban fabric itself. The present paper aims to characterize landscape potentialities through pedestrian perception. Our proposal consists in building a set of sort of sensory Digital Elevation Models in which the third di...

We present an image processing technique for the identification of ’axial lines’ [1] from ridges in isovist fields first proposed by Rana [2, 3]. These ridges are formed from the maximum diametric lengths of the individual isovists, sometimes called viewsheds, that make up the isovist fields [4]. We discuss current strengths and weaknesses of the method, and show how it can be implemented easil...