Using Kinect to study pedestrian behavior
Spying On Our Walking Habits With Kinects, To Create Smarter Spaces – research at MIT’s Senseable City Lab (led by Carlo Ratti) uses the X-box add-on Kinect to track pedestrian behavior. By understanding how people walking through a long corridor react to objects in their path and to oncoming foot traffic, the researchers hope to help us design “smarter airports, train stations, public plazas, shopping malls and supermarkets.”
“In the end,” Ratti says, “the goal is to design places where you can better orient yourself and where you can have a more sociable experience.” He’d even like to put these sensors inside private homes, maybe learn something about how you move around your kitchen, how you use your home appliances. Looked at that way, this idea has applications not just for large crowds in public places, but for elderly individuals who simply want to age in their own homes.