Technology for dynamic viewing and peripheral vision in landscape visualization

The dynamic qualities of looking around and moving about, directly sensing spatial queues, using one’s peripheral vision, and focusing with foveal vision on objects of attention are fundamental to a person’s visual experience in landscape. Unfortunately, the visual media commonly used to structure scientific analysis, professional design, decision-making and artistic interpretation of visual landscapes are quite weak at portraying the dynamic and peripheral dimensions of human vision. Also, visual media whether it be manual drawing, photomontage or state-of-the-art computer animation tend to be time consuming and difficult to apply to these dimensions of seeing. The absence of a convenient, cost-effective means for showing all the fundamental visual aspects of landscape in a balanced way is a serious limitation. This deficiency begs the following questions. Is the current state of knowledge in visual landscape management biased by the relative ease with which established media, such as illustration, photography, and photo-realistic rendering can be used? Do the characteristics of these media bias our perception and thinking about landscape toward static foveal aspects of visual experience? Are our ideas about dynamic viewing and computer animation limited by the didactic frame-by-frame approach characteristic of cinematography and video? Can the introduction of equally robust tools and methods for dynamic and peripheral viewing balance any bias caused by current visualization technology? If McLuhan’s insights about media are correct, then we need to do more research on this question. This paper suggests that the field of landscape visualization needs to develop instruments for research that more fully capture the fundamental components of human vision before we can properly study the question or advance practice. It outlines some ways the next generation of visualization technology can be used to balance the disproportionate emphasis on foveal ways of visual thinking commonly used in the past for the study of visual landscapes. The paper explains this deficiency and proposes some area for research and development of visualization instruments more capable of redressing this imbalance. The paper outlines this issue and proposes that as electronic media and computational media become more developed and are applied to the realm of visual concerns, it will become more practical to include peripheral vision and dynamic viewing in deliberations about visual landscapes. This paper reflects on the potential of visualization automation techniques to overcome these shortcomings through illustrations of project work using innovative software tools developed to explore this question at the Centre for Landscape Research (CLR) at the University of Toronto.