MERLIN-2: Further empirical evidence of lighting for pedestrians

当前往当地目的地时，更安全的街道鼓励人们步行而不是开车。这在很多方面都是有益的：步行可以促进身体健康和与社区的互动，少开车可以减少污染。天黑后，良好的道路照明有助于行人安全。良好的照明可以通过提高前方路线的可见度和提高其他人的可见度，使一个地方感觉更安全。良好的照明可以提高行人及时发现潜在危险并采取避免行动的能力，从而使道路更安全。然而，目前对于什么是“良好的照明”还缺乏足够的认识。虽然公众普遍赞成增加照明水平，但必须考虑到照明所消耗的能源，而且在某种程度上，增加照明水平并不会增加照明的视觉效果。最近的研究表明，我们可以通过优化照明颜色和光的空间分布之间的权衡，在不降低照明的视觉效益的情况下降低照明水平，因为照明水平不一定很高。降低光照水平为减少能源消耗提供了一条快速途径，从而减少了与发电相关的温室气体，这是一种满足当前碳减排承诺的需求方方法。减少光照水平可以减少反射到夜空的光量，并减少夜间照明对野生动物和人类健康的影响。拟议的项目将调查住宅区的道路照明，其设计主要是为了满足行人的需求。我们将首先澄清我们对行人的重要性的理解-他们需要看到什么才能安全行走。这将通过一项新的眼动追踪数据分析来完成，这些数据来自于天黑后在户外行走的行人，视频显示了某人在看什么，以揭示关键的注意力对象，以及我们希望在多远的地方看到它们。实验将探索照明如何影响我们评估他人意图的能力（例如，是友好的还是威胁的），探测潜在的旅行危险，以及照明如何影响感知安全性：我们最近的工作表明，这些是安全行走的关键任务。

When travelling to local destinations, safer streets encourage people to walk rather than drive. That is beneficial in many ways: walking promotes good health and interaction with the community and less driving reduces pollution. After dark, good road lighting contributes to pedestrian safety. Good lighting can make a place feel safer by improving visibility of the route ahead and improving the visibility of other people. Good lighting can make a path safer for pedestrians by improving the ability to detect potential trip hazards in time to take avoiding action. However, there is currently insufficient knowledge of what 'good lighting' is. While the public generally respond favourably to increasing light levels, there must be consideration to the energy consumed by the lighting and that at some point, increasing the light level does not increase the visual benefit of lighting. Recent work has suggested that we can reduce light levels without reducing the visual benefit of lighting because light levels are un-necessarily high and by optimising the trade-off between the colour of lighting and the spatial distribution of light. Reducing light levels offers a rapid route to reduction in energy consumption and hence in the greenhouse gasses associated with electricity generation, a demand-side approach to meeting current carbon-reduction commitments. Reducing light levels reduces the amount of light reflected to the night sky, and reduces the impact of nocturnal lighting on wildlife and human health. The proposed project will investigate road lighting in residential areas, which is designed to meet primarily the needs of pedestrians. We will first clarify our understanding of what matters to pedestrians - what it is they need to see for safe walking. This will be done through a new analysis of eye tracking data from pedestrians walking outdoors after dark, videos which show where someone looks, to reveal the critical objects of attention and how far ahead we would like to see them. Experiments will be carried out to explore how lighting affects our ability to evaluate the intention of other people (e.g. whether friendly or threatening) and to detect potential trip hazards, and how lighting affects perceived safety: our recent work suggests these are the critical tasks for safe walking.