Application Area

Urban Experience Analytics

Cities are designed for people, yet traditional urban planning often measures infrastructure rather than human experience. At BCS Lab, we investigate how people perceive, navigate, and emotionally respond to buildings, streets, parks, transportation systems, and public spaces by combining immersive technologies, physiological sensing, and artificial intelligence.

Research Vision

Design Cities Around Human Experience

We aim to develop intelligent methods for understanding how urban environments influence attention, stress, comfort, safety, accessibility, and decision-making. Our long-term vision is to support architects, urban planners, and policymakers with objective, human-centered evidence for designing healthier and more livable cities.

Core Technologies

Measuring Human Experience in Real Time

Our research integrates immersive virtual environments, eye tracking, physiological sensing, wearable technologies, and multimodal AI to understand how people interact with the built environment before, during, and after real-world experiences.

Virtual Reality Eye Tracking EEG GSR / EDA Wearable Sensors Multimodal AI

Research Focus

Understanding How People Experience Places

Visual Attention

Where Do People Look?

Analyze gaze behavior to understand visual attention, navigation strategies, landmark recognition, environmental preferences, and the effectiveness of architectural design.

Emotional Experience

How Do Places Make Us Feel?

Measure stress, emotional arousal, cognitive workload, and perceived comfort using physiological signals collected during immersive or real-world urban experiences.

Human Behavior

How Do People Move and Decide?

Investigate navigation, spatial cognition, pedestrian behavior, and decision-making to improve accessibility, safety, and user-centered urban design.

Application Domains

Creating Smarter and More Human-Centered Cities

Architecture

Evaluate Building Designs Before Construction

Use immersive simulations and physiological measurements to evaluate how architectural layouts influence comfort, usability, orientation, and user satisfaction.

Urban Planning

Improve Public Spaces

Study how people experience streets, parks, plazas, transportation hubs, and public facilities to support evidence-based urban planning and sustainable city development.

Cultural Heritage

Experience Historical Environments

Build virtual reconstructions that enable researchers and visitors to explore historical sites while evaluating engagement, learning, and emotional responses.

Smart Cities

Human-Centered Urban Intelligence

Combine digital twins, AI, and multimodal sensing to understand how urban environments affect quality of life and to support intelligent, data-driven city management.

Future Directions

From Smart Cities to Human-Centered Cities

We envision future cities that continuously learn from their occupants. By integrating digital twins, immersive simulations, multimodal sensing, and explainable AI, urban environments can become more adaptive, inclusive, sustainable, and responsive to human needs while preserving privacy and ethical principles.

Smart Cities Human Digital Twins Urban Informatics Spatial Cognition Explainable AI Sustainable Design

Student Opportunities

Reimagine the Future of Human-Centered Urban Design

Students in this research area contribute to projects involving virtual reality development, eye-tracking experiments, physiological sensing, spatial cognition, behavioral analytics, digital twins, human-computer interaction, and AI for smart cities. Research combines engineering, architecture, psychology, and urban science to better understand how people experience the built environment.

Unity VR Experiments Eye Tracking EEG & GSR Spatial Analytics Human-Centered AI