highlighting my way

using perceived lighting for wayfinding

As I started questioning cognition and perception, I was curious as to whether lighting conditions alone could provide sufficient detailing of the city, my area, and even my specific path.

As the part of Broadway I was living on was not as dense, I noted that the sunlight was hitting the street level; in fact, that sunlight created many shaded pockets with intensely contrasting shadows. As I started drawing the lighting/shading differences along my path, I realized how you could infer intersections, sections of denser buildings, and even ‘trace’ a more open or closed pathway.

I then moved from trace paper to tracing digitally. At this point, I had collated GIS imaging of my local area, and started sorting pixels to highlight that contrast that I was experiencing that show on GIS data. The pixels now exaggerated the lighting and generated an almost 3D representation of that pathway.

Utilizing processing.js, I developed a game whereby, with the legend, users could start ‘learning’ how to locate the pathway and stay on it using only that contrast in lighting.