Deliverables

2. Predictive Pedestrian Model

To make the copious amounts of pedestrian movement data useful to the city of Venice, the VPC has worked towards developing a predictive pedestrian model that will work with the data already collected to predict future pedestrian movement. The two main pedestrian demographics represented in the model are Venetians and tourists, since they move through the city very differently. A Venetian agent would start their day at home and be attracted to places of employment, grocery stores, or schools. Tourists start their days at hotels and are attracted to points of interest such as museums and restaurants.

In order for the pedestrian agents to move around the city accurately, the team updated an existing map of the streets of Venice in order to be sure that the agents had all realistic options available to them. Additionally, the streets were segmented, enabling the separation of bridges from the streets on either side of them. With pedestrian counts taken at bridges, they can then act as checkpoints in the model, making sure that the movement in the model reflects real trends in pedestrian movement throughout the city.

3. Mobile Application Design Concept:

At the completion of the project the application was not coded. The final result was a concept design for an app that can be made in the future.The mobile application provides guidance through a real-time responsive compass, which would point in the general direction of the preselected destination instead of using turn by turn instructions. The home screen of the application is shown in Figure 1. The user will be able to select one of the nine destinations from a list, which contains all existing yellow signs used by the city. The only exceptions are the red emergency sign and the directional sign for the hospital, which is similar to the yellow signs in functionality, but the hospital option is colored blue instead. These destinations include popular attractions and services. During an emergency, the user can choose the red destination sign as shown in Figure 2, which gives directions to the nearest and less crowded island exit. The purpose of the application was to simulate a navigation experience as similar as possible to following the real signs of Venice. In order to achieve this experience, the fonts Archive Modern II and Revista Stencil were used for the characters inside the yellow and Nizioleti signs, respectively.

Figure 1: Home Screen of the Application Figure 2: Emergency Mode of Application

Another method of destination input is the street address on the Nizioleto sign, which the user can type in by tapping the search icon as seen in Figure 3. After selecting a destination, the user can then follow the direction of the compass. The application also contains GPS functionality in a traditional Google Maps platform, but given the maze-like network of the streets of Venice this may not prove helpful in identifying the user’s current location. This functionality can be turned off and by tapping the GPS icon to save battery or turned on to identify current location. In order to handle the shortcomings of GPS, the application also includes a user input option that identifies current street location by taking a street sign photo or moving a allowing the user to move a pin on the map where he or she thinks the current location is as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 3: Manual Location Input Figure 4: Picture Input for Current Location

Another functionality that facilitates navigation is activated by tapping the map icon, which will give the user the option to drop a pin on the Google map to indicate current location. An example of this functionality is captured in the GIF below, which can be opened by clicking the image:

Figure 5: GIF of Google Map Functionality