Eye-Tracking Technology for Safer Cities
Created By RISC | 3 hours ago
Last modified date : 3 hours ago
Eye tracking, which we looked at for neuromarketing (see https://bit.ly/40LGLjL), is popular in behavioral research, advertising, and digital media. It helps identify areas of interest or the most-viewed elements. This enables deeper insights than traditional surveys by understanding people’s automatic perception behaviors. The results are accurate and make it easier to further develop products.
This technology is now being adopted across various fields—including city design.
City design refers to planning and designing urban areas to balance space usage, infrastructure, environment, economy, and quality of life. The goal is to create cities that meet human needs, are livable, efficient, and sustainable. Urban design typically involves architects working in collaboration with engineers and government authorities.
When traditional architectural approaches to city design are integrated with unexpected, cutting-edge technologies like eye-tracking systems, the results can be surprising. Let’s explore what that looks like.
City design has started using this technology as a tool to improve wayfinding signage by analyzing visual attention. This helps enhance signage design—its colors, typefaces, and focal points of interest.
A compelling example comes from a collaboration between the Institute for Transportation Development Policy (ITDP) and Chelsea in Suffolk City in Boston in the USA. The project aimed to draw more attention to bus stops. The city added brightly colored floral patterns to the area around the bus stops and seating. Eye-tracking technology was then used to monitor where people looked. The visual output below, with green-yellow-red highlights, indicates areas of the image that were viewed less to more frequently.
As we can see, adding color and floral patterns around the bus stop successfully attracted more visual attention, helping people recognize and approach the stop more effectively.
This is just one example of how behavioral science technology can be applied in conjunction with urban design. It shows how technology can be effectively leveraged in real-world applications. Curious about the next article? Stay tuned to this page!
Story by Nattapat Tanjariyaporn, Senior Researcher in Brain Computer Interface, RISC
Reference by
Biometrics + Bus Stops: What Eye Tracking + Facial Expression Analysis Reveal | The Genetics of Design