>  I would compare conventional SS as Newton
>Laws of gravity, nice and simple and works well for regional levels, however
>the workings of real spaces (and their influence on people) would perhaps
>require a probability-based, chaotic, random, non-physical (i.e. sound,
>colour, 3D, Metric (amongst many others, characterisation of space.

If you read my paper about fractional configuration from the third
space syntax conference you will notice I mention the possibility of
using fractional measures in the building context. Two examples I
give are

1. Using the area of overlap as a measure of the strength of
connection. In this case if two items overlap to a great extend the
distance is near 0. If two spaces overlap to a small degree then the
distance is near 1.

2. The second example I give is doing a similar thing but for the
volume (3D). In this case the volume of overlap is significant. As in
the above case near complete overlap creates a connection strength of
1 and weak overlap gives a connection strength of near 1. In this
case moving from a low space to a high space gives a significant
change in the depth of a system. An atrium would more likely be a
more central space.

Both these systems introduce metric properties of a space (its
relative area ) but in a way which is very compatible to SS.
Alternatively  you could say that fractional measures are
probability-based. If the weight between line a and line b is near
0.0 then the probability of choosing that line is near 1.0.

Color is an interesting property and one which is at least could be
exposed to experimental testing. For example you could repaint a
building and then see how movement changes.


>To that effect, I have started a personal project on mapping SS measures in
>3D for some well-known buildings. The output would be just a colourful
"Atlas of Nice Buildings" and their "SS signatures".

How ever I'm still a strong supporter of the 'people don't fly'
school of SS. We might appreciate the volumes but when we move we
still move in the plane. This is how architects typically draw
buildings as a number of sections.  I spent a lot of time programming
unlinks,bridges and super-links into the user interface of Axman and
Webmap just to allow people to function in 3D

Ultimatly I think the more general problem of see and can't go
implies we might have to develop a multi layered graph. In this so
called hyper-graph the nodes are the same for each layer - one per
room. The connections have 2 separate layers, one for where you can
go and one for where you can see.

The question I still haven't fathomed is how this alters the depths
of the nodes. If I see some where and can't go then do I regard that
as depth 1 or depth 0 ? If 1 then I might as well use the visibility
map. If depth 0 then it might as well use the connectivity map. There
are possibilities but nothing incredibly solid yet.

Generally I feel we should be careful about using nice or well known
buildings in research. Its a bit like being a linguist studying the
syntax of a language by only researching poetry.

sheep