Affect in Spatial Navigation: A Study of Rooms

How do spaces make us feel? What is the perceived emotional impact of built form? This study proposes a framework to identify and model the effects that our perceived environment can have by taking into consideration illumination and structural form while acknowledging its temporal dimension. To study this, we recruited 100 participants via a crowd-sourcing platform in order to annotate their perceived arousal or pleasure shifts while watching videos depicting spatial navigation in first person view. Participants’ annotations were recorded as time-continuous unbounded traces, allowing us to extract ordinal labels about how their arousal or pleasure fluctuated as the camera moved between different rooms. Given the subjective nature of the task and the noisy signals from real-time annotation, a number of processing steps are applied in order to convert the data into ordinal relationships between affect metrics in different rooms. Experiments with random forests and other classifiers show that, with the right treatment and data cleanup, simple interior design features can be adequate predictors of human arousal and pleasure changes over time. The dataset is made available in order to prompt exploration of additional modalities as input and ground truth extraction.