Looking ahead: a vision-based software for predicting pedestrian movement

This paper presents ongoing research on the use of agents equipped with "exomatic visual architecture" (Turner et al., 2001). The main objective was to test whether some rarely explored isovist measures, like drift and longest line of sight, are associated with aggregated movement patterns of downtown Santiago, Chile. To test this idea, a series of algorithms were created and compared with observed data recorded at approximately 200 points during an entire workday. The main results show that driftbased algorithms were better suited to predict aggregated patterns than random behavior, although the extent of such relation is still weak (r2 = 0.27). From a theoretical point of view, these results seem to be in accordance with current cognitive theories (Clark, 2009; Thompson, 2007) stressing the dynamic nature of human behavior