Landscape Filtering in Animation Design

Marco Ruocco

Department of Geography

University of California at Santa Barbara

Advisor: Dan Montello

“Fluvial Vision”

Outline

• Introduction• Landscape filtering• Response to landscape• Experimental design • Expected results• Conclusions• Future work

Introduction

• About human psychological response to landscape• Do qualitatively different trajectories over

landscape elicit a different response?• In general, does selecting specific viewpoints on

the landscape (“filtering”) influence response?• Experimental design: landscape animation

(stimuli) and questionnaire (recording response)

Landscape filtering

• The term “landscape” from 16th century Flemish “landskip” as a view or prospect on various “elements” of the environment to be painted.

• Thus, landscape as a specific view on the land, a painter’s selection of the visual information available in the environment

• Selection, or “filtering”, as an epistemological process enabling, and prior to, representation, experience and exploration of landscape

Human response

• Response to landscape is considered in terms of aesthetics, spatial knowledge and sense of place

• Information-processing theories of environmental aesthetics (in particular, Berlyne and Kaplan)

• Aesthetics as a synthetic evaluative relationship with landscape intertwined with the other two variables

• Evolutionary and ecological components

Experimental design

• Independent variable 1: two trajectories, low/terrain-following and high/uniform, identical in ground being covered and speed (between-subject)

• Elevation chosen as independent variable because of differences in perception, cognition and experience of landscape scale

• Independent variable 2: three landscapes, varying in topographical structure and visual complexity, as well as general appearance (within-subject)

• N ~= 40 (Geography undergraduates)

Animation 1 – Silver Canyon (Catalina), Low, Terrain-Following, 900 frames (30 s.)

Animation 2 – Silver Canyon (Catalina), High, Uniform, 900 frames (30 s.)

Animation 3 – Plain Cruise (Santa Ynez Valley, CA) Low, Terrain-Following, 900 frames (30 s.)

Animation 4 – Plain Cruise (Santa Ynez Valley, CA), High, Uniform, 900 frames (30 s.)

Questionnaire

• >50 questions: close-ended Likert scale (1-7) , open-ended, sketch maps

• Aesthetics: preference, informational factors (coherence, complexity, legibility, mystery),

• Spatial knowledge: terrain characteristics, landscape features

• Sense of place: memorability, character, striking/ not striking

• Background info, exposure to landscape arts and sciences

Pilot Tests

• Two pilot experiments carried out:1) N=14. General test of research strategy using

preliminary version of stimuli, revealing significant differences across conditions

• Feeling of having “survey” knowledge: “I feel I know enough of that landscape to find my way around in it”. Significantly higher rating of agreement for High/Uniform condition than Low/Terrain-Following condition (p<0.05)

2) N=7. Testing with an informal discussion at the end to see if the questionnaire “made sense”

Expected results

• Detailed “mapping” of different response to high and low trajectories (i.e., first-person/ground view, and map-like layout view)

• Ground view might be revealed as more visually complex and thus aesthetically distinct over the “convenience” of the layout view for spatial knowledge (e.g. Pilot 1)

• Would show the necessity of a design approach to landscape animation based on landscape“filtering” (i.e. a theory of camera motion over landscape)

Conclusions

• Study about human response to landscape• Landscape filtering is the process by which we

select our exposure to landscape• Experimental design to measure the different

psychological response to two trajectories (i.e., landscape filters)

• Landscape animation used to produce stimuli for experimentation

• This might lead to a design approach to landscape animation

Future work

Towards completing the MA Thesis:• Theoretical framework:

– Hagerstrand’s Time Geography as a theory of visual accessibility

– Filters and epistemology of filtering

• Experiment:– Third pilot test to verify overall procedure (3

questionnaires might be too demanding)

– Final testing on about 40 participants

Questions and feedback?