A Framework for Integrating Visual Quality Modelling within an Agent-Based Hiking Simulation for the Swiss Alps

Abstract

While the visual qualities of a landscape are often key factors in attracting and retaining tourist visitors, they have been overlooked in recent simulation approaches to recreation modelling. While there has been a long history of modelling the visual quality of a landscape, particularly in forestry, due to computational restrictions these models have tended to be rather coarse and primarily suited for avoiding catastrophic impacts due to large-scale interventions in a landscape. However, the experience of the visual quality of a landscape for recreationists is much more subtle. Relatively small changes to spatial patterns and land use, when viewed cumulatively, can have a large impact on the attractiveness of a landscape for tourists. Methods for evaluating the changing visual quality of a landscape are invaluable for comprehensive long-term landscape planning. This paper describes a computational approach for integrating visual quality information into an agent-based simulation of summer hikers in the Swiss Alps. The benefits of microscopic modelling (where the activities of individual hikers are simulated) are combined with detailed 3D models to provide the possibility of a highly nuanced visual quality analysis of a recreational area. Using real-time computer graphics techniques, simulated agents interpret computer generated 3D images of what they 'see' as they move through the landscape. Various landscape metrics are calculated based on these representations