Speaker
Description
For the majority, our experience of landscape is driven by the visual. While we often use visibility models built into geospatial software to capture viewsheds, these only represent portions of the landscape that can be seen and do not take into account other environmental and physiological aspects that limit what we can perceive. In 1975, landscape architect Tadahiko Higuchi offered a set of indices that build on the traditional viewsheds by considering variables such visual clarity, atmospheric moisture, and others to capture the nuance that is missing from the traditional visibility models. Moving from what is visible to what is perceived has provided greater insight over the last half century as the approach has been used across Geography, archaeology, and other fields. This presentation will focus on the application of Higuchi’s indices and related considerations of visual perception along a portion of the Shikoku Buddhist Pilgrimage in Japan.
