When a person is traveling to an unknown location, he would usually look in a map and try to find the shortest route to get there. However, finding the shortest route may give a different impact depending on whether the person is walking or driving. For those who prefer to walk because they wanted to enjoy their surroundings, they now have the option to do it "aesthetically."
Walking enables a person to take a more "personal" look on the things around him. It makes him discover new buildings, streets, and even gives him the opportunity to meet some new people in the neighborhood. To achieve this, pedestrians would normally choose the quietest route or the one where they can see more beautiful sights. However, this option is not available yet in any mapping application.
All of these will soon be changed once the new mapping app rolls out and becomes publicly available. The credit goes to Daniele Quercia and his team from the Yahoo Labs based in Barcelona, Spain. The team worked hard to gather information on the beauty levels of certain locations in the city. Then, they created an algorithm that will connect two locations while considering the beauty of places that will be encountered along the way.
The first step is to build a large collection of places which are deemed as beautiful. The team asked some volunteers in the project who tested and confirmed their choices of attractive routes. They also examined around four million Flickr images that show specific locations in London to get a better idea on places that are considered as beautiful.
Using quantitative validation in their analysis, the team finds out that the recommended places created new routes that will add only a few minutes of walking time compared to the shortest routes that pedestrians are already familiar with. They also concluded that these new routes are indeed more beautiful, peaceful, and happy.
The Yahoo research team went further by attempting to gather the same results in Boston. Backed by 1.3 million pictures of the city from Flickr, the team casted their beauty scores in order to build beautiful routes. Using the judging criteria of beauty and short distance, the team recruited fifty-four participants to compare directions. The participants have attested that the paths produced by the Flickr metadata are definitely more beautiful than the commonly known shortest paths at the rate of 35 percent.
