Quantifying visual preferences around the world

Website aesthetics have been recognized as an influential moderator of people's behavior and perception. However, what users perceive as "good design" is subject to individual preferences, questioning the feasibility of universal design guidelines. To better understand how people's visual preferences differ, we collected 2.4 million ratings of the visual appeal of websites from nearly 40 thousand participants of diverse backgrounds. We address several gaps in the knowledge about design preferences of previously understudied groups. Among other findings, our results show that the level of colorfulness and visual complexity at which visual appeal is highest strongly varies: Females, for example, liked colorful websites more than males. A high education level generally lowers this preference for colorfulness. Russians preferred a lower visual complexity, and Macedonians liked highly colorful designs more than any other country in our dataset. We contribute a computational model and estimates of peak appeal that can be used to support rapid evaluations of website design prototypes for specific target groups.Engineering and Applied Science

Bank Networks from Text: Interrelations, Centrality and Determinants

In the wake of the still ongoing global financial crisis, bank interdependencies have come into focus in trying to assess linkages among banks and systemic risk. To date, such analysis has largely been based on numerical data. By contrast, this study attempts to gain further insight into bank interconnections by tapping into financial discourse. We present a text-to-network process, which has its basis in co-occurrences of bank names and can be analyzed quantitatively and visualized. To quantify bank importance, we propose an information centrality measure to rank and assess trends of bank centrality in discussion. For qualitative assessment of bank networks, we put forward a visual, interactive interface for better illustrating network structures. We illustrate the text-based approach on European Large and Complex Banking Groups (LCBGs) during the ongoing financial crisis by quantifying bank interrelations and centrality from discussion in 3M news articles, spanning 2007Q1 to 2014Q3.Comment: Quantitative Finance, forthcoming in 201

I Am The Passenger: How Visual Motion Cues Can Influence Sickness For In-Car VR

This paper explores the use of VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) in-car and in-motion for the first time. Immersive HMDs are becoming everyday consumer items and, as they offer new possibilities for entertainment and productivity, people will want to use them during travel in, for example, autonomous cars. However, their use is confounded by motion sickness caused in-part by the restricted visual perception of motion conflicting with physically perceived vehicle motion (accelerations/rotations detected by the vestibular system). Whilst VR HMDs restrict visual perception of motion, they could also render it virtually, potentially alleviating sensory conflict. To study this problem, we conducted the first on-road and in motion study to systematically investigate the effects of various visual presentations of the real-world motion of a car on the sickness and immersion of VR HMD wearing passengers. We established new baselines for VR in-car motion sickness, and found that there is no one best presentation with respect to balancing sickness and immersion. Instead, user preferences suggest different solutions are required for differently susceptible users to provide usable VR in-car. This work provides formative insights for VR designers and an entry point for further research into enabling use of VR HMDs, and the rich experiences they offer, when travelling

A large-scale real-life crowd steering experiment via arrow-like stimuli

We introduce "Moving Light": an unprecedented real-life crowd steering experiment that involved about 140.000 participants among the visitors of the Glow 2017 Light Festival (Eindhoven, NL). Moving Light targets one outstanding question of paramount societal and technological importance: "can we seamlessly and systematically influence routing decisions in pedestrian crowds?" Establishing effective crowd steering methods is extremely relevant in the context of crowd management, e.g. when it comes to keeping floor usage within safety limits (e.g. during public events with high attendance) or at designated comfort levels (e.g. in leisure areas). In the Moving Light setup, visitors walking in a corridor face a choice between two symmetric exits defined by a large central obstacle. Stimuli, such as arrows, alternate at random and perturb the symmetry of the environment to bias choices. While visitors move in the experiment, they are tracked with high space and time resolution, such that the efficiency of each stimulus at steering individual routing decisions can be accurately evaluated a posteriori. In this contribution, we first describe the measurement concept in the Moving Light experiment and then we investigate quantitatively the steering capability of arrow indications.Comment: 8 page

Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economical and social media activity

Scientific studies investigating laws and regularities of human behavior are nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital information produced by human social activity. In this paper we leverage big data created by three different aspects of human activity (i.e., bank card transactions, geotagged photographs and tweets) in Spain for quantifying city attractiveness for the foreign visitors. An important finding of this papers is a strong superlinear scaling of city attractiveness with its population size. The observed scaling exponent stays nearly the same for different ways of defining cities and for different data sources, emphasizing the robustness of our finding. Temporal variation of the scaling exponent is also considered in order to reveal seasonal patterns in the attractivenessComment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Landscape metrics and indices : an overview of their use in landscape research

The aim of this overview paper is to analyze the use of various landscape metrics and landscape indices for the characterization of landscape structure and various processes at both landscape and ecosystem level. We analyzed the appearance of the terms landscape metrics/indexes/indices in combination with seven main categories in the field of landscape ecology [1) use/selection and misuse of metrics, 2) biodiversity and habitat analysis; 3) water quality; 4) evaluation of the landscape pattern and its change; 5) urban landscape pattern, road network; 6) aesthetics of landscape; 7) management, planning and monitoring] in the titles, abstracts and/or key words of research papers published in international peer-reviewed scientific journals indexed by the Institute of Science Information (ISI) Web of Science (WoS) from 1994 to October 2008. Most of the landscape metrics and indices are used concerning biodiversity and habitat analysis, and also the evaluation of landscape pattern and its change (up to 25 articles per year). There are only a few articles on the relationships of landscape metrics/indices/indexes to social aspects and landscape perception