9 ms·

The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

85 points by rsj_hn 7y ago

ajuc 7y ago
Isn't it simply brain looking at the edges of things? If a building doesn't have edges inside it then we look at its silhouette.
- rsj_hn 7y ago
  The author shows how for more classical buildings with more structure, the eye focus on the structural aspects of the buildings.
  - kissickas 7y ago
    In a much tighter image. The last picture with the older building gives the viewer almost no choice to look around, beyond, or even above the building when compared to the first one. There may be some truth to the statement in the title, but these three images are not evidence of much.
    - rsj_hn 7y ago
      Take a look at the referenced study. There's quite a large number of examples where you have plenty of room to look around. (pdf) http://www.devensec.com/news/Eye_Tracking_Devens_1_11_18%20report.pdf http://www.devensec.com/news/Eye_Tracking_Devens_1_11_18%20r...
  - creato 7y ago
    No, the author shows that some random computer vision tool focuses on more structural aspects of the buildings. Assuming that is related at all to what "the eye" does is ridiculous.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      Assuming that a tool explicitly created to simulate visual human behaviour would do exactly that doesn't seem very strange. You can look at their validation study, it does ok: http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-attention-software-vas-validation-study.pdf http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...
  - ajuc 7y ago
    > the eye focus on the structural aspects of the buildings which are mostly edges
userbinator 7y ago
It turns out that the new glassy exteriors, whether boxy or round, are really tough on the brain—difficult for it to take in. I'd say it is the exact opposite: no one will focus on flat nearly-featureless surfaces, because there is no fine detail to focus on. It's easy to "take in" at a glance, so the brain doesn't direct any more attention to it.
- raducu 7y ago
  Also bland, badly-composed uninteresting picture -- it's all a noisy background. Just use google images search for glass skyscrapers an repeat the experiment.
gfaure 7y ago
This seems ridiculous. Based on the output of an automated tool developed by 3M that produces a saliency map based on an image, I'm not sure how we can conclude that people ignore skyscrapers.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  How does the software work? Seam carving style "energy functions" or neural networks? If it's neural networks how did they train it? Eye tracker?
  - gfaure 7y ago
    My guess is a CNN trained to produce a mask that matches the output of some eye tracker on a specifically solicited task. As another poster observed, strapping someone in and asking them to "act natural" probably introduces some unwanted bias.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    It seems to be old fashioned image processing using expert created feature extractors and such. https://web.archive.org/web/20180604223618/http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/VAS_NA/Home/How2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180604223618/http://solutions.... Validation data is eye tracking http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-attention-software-vas-validation-study.pdf http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...
- praptak 7y ago
  I don't believe the article makes this claim. It's not about people actually ignoring the skyscrapers, but rather the low-level layers of the brain tagging them as not worth looking at. This sounds plausible - glassy skyscrapers look a lot like the sky, which isn't very interesting to look at.
  - brador 7y ago
    They strapped people with a headset that tracks their eyes and told them to look at something. The brain will naturally then try to find the special thing the wearer thinks the researchers want them to look at to get a good result. Probably the sky, not the boring buildings.
deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
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reggie44 7y ago
The article keeps using the word 'ignore'. The brain is not ignoring the buildings, its just looking at them more subliminally.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  No, the claim is explicitly that the fast visual processing parts of the brain (the subliminal processing) decides the eye should focus on something other than the buildings. That's quite clearly within the reasonable interpretation of "ignore".
numlock86 7y ago
> It’s equally instructive to see how the older parts of the Seaport (above) original 19th-C commercial buildings on Seaport Boulevard, for instance, fit well within the city. Cherry picking. The sample images are misleading at best. First one is mainly three buildings with quite some space around like sky and ground, even more buildings in the back. Second one is basically only the facade of one building. Sure there is a car, a bit of street and even some sky. But really there is not much else to look at.
draugadrotten 7y ago
Somehow there seems to be an application for military use here. Make a shiny tank and the enemy just won't be able to see it. Or does the shiny magic only work on civilian buildings?
- GuB-42 7y ago
  It looks like reflective surfaces are a camouflage technique, and it is used in nature (fishes, beetles,...). It makes sense: mirrors copy their environment, and I suspect it is what is happening here: the buildings reflect the blue sky behind and so the brain thinks they are the sky. And for the brain, the blue sky is probably the most uninteresting thing there is. The problem I see with reflective camouflage is that it depends on the angle. At worst it reflects sunlight and can create flashes that can be seen from extremely far away. That's how signaling mirrors work. If imitating the blue sky is what you want, just paint the thing blue. In fact, that part of the idea behind the "horizon blue" uniform of the French army during World War 1.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It's been done with airplanes already. Some spy planes were shiny to be less visible in low overflight during the day. That also confuses simple optical sensors.
- hydrox24 7y ago
  Dazzle camouflage[0] was used extensively in WWI to make it difficult to see ships because they were so brightly coloured. It's not quite the same principle, but it comes close. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
  - jrockway 7y ago
    The ships were easy to see. What was hard is determining what side you were looking at and what direction they were moving. This made it more difficult to engage them.
    - 7y ago
TheRealSteel 7y ago
The second image doesn't have anything else in the image to look at, whereas the first has multiple buildings and plenty of sky space. This article is bollocks. They've worked backwards from a conclusion to find (bad) evidence.
- Reason077 7y ago
  Isn’t part of the point of reflective glass cladding to reflect the sky, disguise the building’s bulk, make it less imposing, etc? If people’s eyes aren’t being drawn to it, then it seems like it’s succeeded at that aim.
  - theon144 7y ago
    If people's eyes aren't being drawn to it... >Mother Nature, the architect of our perception, with a good 3.8 billion years of design experience, won’t allow it. We simply will not connect to a place she informs us isn’t there or worth looking at! And I'd tend to agree. If the purpose of the design is to act as if there is not a building, act as if it's a non-place - then what should I remember about it? Why should I want to be there, if there's "nothing"?
- atoav 7y ago
  As somebody who dealt with photography and cameras his whole life and took pictures as a professional for movies: this isn’t bollocks. The visual readability of an opaque non-reflective cube is always going to be higher than that of a mirror cube in a non studio environment. This is because your brain needs to do more legwork to figure out the underlying shape when you look at reflective suefaces that are mostly flat and show you parts of a sky that you may or may not see at that point. Reflectivity can also work in your favour, to highlight shapes, especially when the paint additionally has a diffuse color (think of cars) and they are in eye level (less confusing sky reflections), but highly reflective glass buildings with nothing else to gisually hold on will most of the time just reflect a random patch of the sky. What visual readability is, is the answer to the question how fast and effortless a image can be read. A certain degree of unreadability may be interesting even, but I am not sure if architects are that aware of the reflective part of their buildings. E.g. I happen to have the luck to have a second sun in the end of the day despite my east-facing windows, because one of the glas buildings opposite. I am sure they didn’t simulate that. I am also sure this increases the temperature in the city. Most architects I met just think glas looks rad and all their collegues use it and so they do too.
acchow 7y ago
In the first photo, it seems more like the glass facade camouflages with the sky which gives an illusion of more nature and less artificial construction.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  There's not much nature there, it's just empty sky. For simple comparison of what gives a stronger nature experience, just go out into a field and compare looking straight up to looking out across the field
patrickfatrick 7y ago
Seems like the first image is just looking for the areas of highest contrast, ie the completely overexposed areas of clouds against the darker building. Meanwhile the second photo lacks any areas of significant contrast. Bleh.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
This resonates with some of my experiences. When I had a corporate job, I worked in a large glassy building that wasn't a skyscraper. It was initially one story -- though tall for just one story because it was industrial scale and held more than a thousand employees (about two thousand, at least after the addition). The one story building reflected the sea of blacktop parking lots around it and appeared ominously black. They added a two-story addition to one end and moved my department there. It became clearer that the building appeared to be ominously black because of what it reflected. The taller part reflected the sky while its base still seemed ominously black. It became even clearer that this was so when they built a three-story building next door to house the IT department. That building mostly looked like floating clouds and blue sky. Very little of it seemed visually heavy and ominously dark. But they were equally hard to mentally process. It was hard to comprehend these buildings whose appearance morphed based on what was being reflected. It was hard to figure out where they began and ended, what they were made of, etc. It was not only disorienting, it was disturbing. It was a bit like working in a fun house mirror.
senozhatsky 7y ago
I like glassy buildings. Can stare at them for minutes; the article makes little sense to me. E.g. Hong Kong Harbour skyline, which is quite "glassy". Many people travel to take a look at it. [1] https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/SPLQhcPHF_u06LNEFd1qIc4p_3Q=/950x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-586892388-5c7b646fc9e77c0001d19d3b.jpg https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/SPLQhcPHF_u06LNEFd1qIc4p_3Q=/...
- flexie 7y ago
  This image shows the opposite of a glassy skyline. The only true glass building, which reflects sky and water, is the one just above the boat. The rest of the buildings are more traditional sky scrapers with mixed cladding.
  - senozhatsky 7y ago
    Maybe. But I can count something like 6 or 7 buildings on that pic which look glassy to me. I'd say there are several glassy (which reflect sky and water) buildings there [1][2]. [1] https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7263112-panning-timelapse-video-victoria-harbour-hong-kong https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7263112-panning-time... [2] https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-27791884-victoria-harbor-hong-kong-14-june-2017 https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-27791884-victoria-ha... Edit: added more links.
EGreg 7y ago
I agree that, in general for everyday stuff, I prefer "down to earth" stuff like the gritty NYC in the 80s or SF of today, than glitzy skyscrapers. They seem too sterile. BUT in those photos, man, there are so many confounding variables. How about the fact that the sky is brighter than the skyscrapers, so you could be looking for where it is brighter? Secondly, there isn't much detail or variation on those "boxes", so your brain doesn't find that patch very interesting. And so on. There are plenty of skyscrapers people notice right away, e.g. the empire state building, the space needle, etc.
burfog 7y ago
They can reflect enough light to melt cars: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-skyscraper-Walkie-Talkie-melted-cars-reflecting-sunlight-fitted-shading.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-skys... https://wonderfulengineering.com/skyscraper-literally-melts-a-car-in-england/ https://wonderfulengineering.com/skyscraper-literally-melts-...
nabla9 7y ago
Perfect design for Evilcorp hq.
csomar 7y ago
Playing Devil's advocate: The glassy skyscrapers are a good design because you ignore them. So it's like they don't exist. On a more serious note, this is kinda of an isolated part of Boston city. It's a port that requires crossing the bridge. The bigger problem is that they are building huge buildings with no connection to the subway/metro network.
- sulam 7y ago
  Silver line goes there, but I’m not sure how useful that is.
kolinko 7y ago
Should we flag this post? The "science" presented in this article is so bad it deserves being called fake news. Like the commenters mentioned: - the photos are chosen in such a way that it's obvious eyes won't go looking into the buildings - there is no mention of the sample size regarding participants and photos that were shown. looks like cherrypicking
- auslander 7y ago
  Flagging should be removed from HN, or at least give an option to un-flag. Its a good interesting article. You stated your opinion in your comment. Why do you need to flag the post?
a_e_k 7y ago
Just for fun, here's how some of OpenCV's feature detectors handle the first image: AKAZE: https://imgur.com/EvcStcH https://imgur.com/EvcStcH ORB: https://imgur.com/YHSEDD7 https://imgur.com/YHSEDD7 I certainly wouldn't make any claims about what this says about the human visual system, but at least for these two algorithms they do seem to have troubles finding interesting key points to track on the buildings.
rb808 7y ago
I love 4 WTC, for some reason its extra-mirrory, really tall with a flat roof, from the street it often looks like it disappears. https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a212479bdf344d9S1000x700W0seB505153O/0ca546855e4bfa8001033dcaf223b2e4a70c6d68 https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a21247... https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e65aec3ec1aS1000x700W0seB505153O/9eed7b2022eca55b6a4eca675aac7b4f29099cb7 https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e6... https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e875b4702cf0S1000x700W0seB505153O/bb46f7a7a95d1ca70178bc178e148a9c4a3daff5 https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e87...
- mcv 7y ago
  I can't help but wonder how much of this is influenced by the lighting and composition of the photo. Both your examples and those in the article. I'm generally not a fan of the all-glass architecture, or even modern architecture in general, and prefer buildings made of stone, and preferably on a human scale, like 19th and early 20th century architecture. After the War, buildings became featureless and soulless, and when architects started making them look good from a distance or from the sky, and not up close. Designed to look good as a model but not something for real people to live in. Recent years have fortunately seen a return to more sensible architecture.
  - rb808 7y ago
    Yes definitely that second pic is probably not great. One thing I think it does benefit from is being surrounded by other tall buildings, so often you can only see it from very close up and its that view in the first photo that I see nearly every day.
Havoc 7y ago
Feels like the wrong conclusion in submission title to me. Glass buildings are by their nature quite uniform & featureless. ...of course the brain looks elsewhere. And I don't think it's a given that it's a bad thing either. If you think about an ocean - people tend to look at the horizon not stare at the fairly uniform ocean surface. Nothing wrong with the ocean surface though
annsussman 7y ago
I'm the author of this article. These are good questions and comments; evolution's preset the way we take in surroundings and brain can't 'fixate' or focus on glassy facades; eye-tracking studies and emulation software used in article, show this. You can read more studies showing this here: https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/07/why-eye-track-boston-city-hall-to-see-evolution-at-work/ https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/07/why-eye-track-boston... And here: https://commonedge.org/game-changing-eye-tracking-studies-reveal-how-we-actually-see-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/game-changing-eye-tracking-studies-re... And if you're curious about why modern architecture is 'avoidant' here: https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod... LMK if you have questions; always open to discussing.

85 points by rsj_hn 7y ago

ajuc 7y ago

Isn't it simply brain looking at the edges of things? If a building doesn't have edges inside it then we look at its silhouette.

rsj_hn 7y ago
The author shows how for more classical buildings with more structure, the eye focus on the structural aspects of the buildings.
- kissickas 7y ago
  In a much tighter image. The last picture with the older building gives the viewer almost no choice to look around, beyond, or even above the building when compared to the first one. There may be some truth to the statement in the title, but these three images are not evidence of much.
  - rsj_hn 7y ago
    Take a look at the referenced study. There's quite a large number of examples where you have plenty of room to look around. (pdf) http://www.devensec.com/news/Eye_Tracking_Devens_1_11_18%20report.pdf http://www.devensec.com/news/Eye_Tracking_Devens_1_11_18%20r...
- creato 7y ago
  No, the author shows that some random computer vision tool focuses on more structural aspects of the buildings. Assuming that is related at all to what "the eye" does is ridiculous.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Assuming that a tool explicitly created to simulate visual human behaviour would do exactly that doesn't seem very strange. You can look at their validation study, it does ok: http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-attention-software-vas-validation-study.pdf http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...
- ajuc 7y ago
  > the eye focus on the structural aspects of the buildings which are mostly edges

userbinator 7y ago

It turns out that the new glassy exteriors, whether boxy or round, are really tough on the brain—difficult for it to take in. I'd say it is the exact opposite: no one will focus on flat nearly-featureless surfaces, because there is no fine detail to focus on. It's easy to "take in" at a glance, so the brain doesn't direct any more attention to it.

raducu 7y ago
Also bland, badly-composed uninteresting picture -- it's all a noisy background. Just use google images search for glass skyscrapers an repeat the experiment.

gfaure 7y ago

This seems ridiculous. Based on the output of an automated tool developed by 3M that produces a saliency map based on an image, I'm not sure how we can conclude that people ignore skyscrapers.

sansnomme 7y ago
How does the software work? Seam carving style "energy functions" or neural networks? If it's neural networks how did they train it? Eye tracker?
- gfaure 7y ago
  My guess is a CNN trained to produce a mask that matches the output of some eye tracker on a specifically solicited task. As another poster observed, strapping someone in and asking them to "act natural" probably introduces some unwanted bias.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  It seems to be old fashioned image processing using expert created feature extractors and such. https://web.archive.org/web/20180604223618/http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/VAS_NA/Home/How2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180604223618/http://solutions.... Validation data is eye tracking http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-attention-software-vas-validation-study.pdf http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...
praptak 7y ago
I don't believe the article makes this claim. It's not about people actually ignoring the skyscrapers, but rather the low-level layers of the brain tagging them as not worth looking at. This sounds plausible - glassy skyscrapers look a lot like the sky, which isn't very interesting to look at.
- brador 7y ago
  They strapped people with a headset that tracks their eyes and told them to look at something. The brain will naturally then try to find the special thing the wearer thinks the researchers want them to look at to get a good result. Probably the sky, not the boring buildings.

deleted 7y ago

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reggie44 7y ago

The article keeps using the word 'ignore'. The brain is not ignoring the buildings, its just looking at them more subliminally.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
No, the claim is explicitly that the fast visual processing parts of the brain (the subliminal processing) decides the eye should focus on something other than the buildings. That's quite clearly within the reasonable interpretation of "ignore".

numlock86 7y ago

> It’s equally instructive to see how the older parts of the Seaport (above) original 19th-C commercial buildings on Seaport Boulevard, for instance, fit well within the city. Cherry picking. The sample images are misleading at best. First one is mainly three buildings with quite some space around like sky and ground, even more buildings in the back. Second one is basically only the facade of one building. Sure there is a car, a bit of street and even some sky. But really there is not much else to look at.

draugadrotten 7y ago

Somehow there seems to be an application for military use here. Make a shiny tank and the enemy just won't be able to see it. Or does the shiny magic only work on civilian buildings?

GuB-42 7y ago
It looks like reflective surfaces are a camouflage technique, and it is used in nature (fishes, beetles,...). It makes sense: mirrors copy their environment, and I suspect it is what is happening here: the buildings reflect the blue sky behind and so the brain thinks they are the sky. And for the brain, the blue sky is probably the most uninteresting thing there is. The problem I see with reflective camouflage is that it depends on the angle. At worst it reflects sunlight and can create flashes that can be seen from extremely far away. That's how signaling mirrors work. If imitating the blue sky is what you want, just paint the thing blue. In fact, that part of the idea behind the "horizon blue" uniform of the French army during World War 1.
AstralStorm 7y ago
It's been done with airplanes already. Some spy planes were shiny to be less visible in low overflight during the day. That also confuses simple optical sensors.
hydrox24 7y ago
Dazzle camouflage[0] was used extensively in WWI to make it difficult to see ships because they were so brightly coloured. It's not quite the same principle, but it comes close. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
- jrockway 7y ago
  The ships were easy to see. What was hard is determining what side you were looking at and what direction they were moving. This made it more difficult to engage them.
  - 7y ago

TheRealSteel 7y ago

The second image doesn't have anything else in the image to look at, whereas the first has multiple buildings and plenty of sky space. This article is bollocks. They've worked backwards from a conclusion to find (bad) evidence.

Reason077 7y ago
Isn’t part of the point of reflective glass cladding to reflect the sky, disguise the building’s bulk, make it less imposing, etc? If people’s eyes aren’t being drawn to it, then it seems like it’s succeeded at that aim.
- theon144 7y ago
  If people's eyes aren't being drawn to it... >Mother Nature, the architect of our perception, with a good 3.8 billion years of design experience, won’t allow it. We simply will not connect to a place she informs us isn’t there or worth looking at! And I'd tend to agree. If the purpose of the design is to act as if there is not a building, act as if it's a non-place - then what should I remember about it? Why should I want to be there, if there's "nothing"?
atoav 7y ago
As somebody who dealt with photography and cameras his whole life and took pictures as a professional for movies: this isn’t bollocks. The visual readability of an opaque non-reflective cube is always going to be higher than that of a mirror cube in a non studio environment. This is because your brain needs to do more legwork to figure out the underlying shape when you look at reflective suefaces that are mostly flat and show you parts of a sky that you may or may not see at that point. Reflectivity can also work in your favour, to highlight shapes, especially when the paint additionally has a diffuse color (think of cars) and they are in eye level (less confusing sky reflections), but highly reflective glass buildings with nothing else to gisually hold on will most of the time just reflect a random patch of the sky. What visual readability is, is the answer to the question how fast and effortless a image can be read. A certain degree of unreadability may be interesting even, but I am not sure if architects are that aware of the reflective part of their buildings. E.g. I happen to have the luck to have a second sun in the end of the day despite my east-facing windows, because one of the glas buildings opposite. I am sure they didn’t simulate that. I am also sure this increases the temperature in the city. Most architects I met just think glas looks rad and all their collegues use it and so they do too.

acchow 7y ago

In the first photo, it seems more like the glass facade camouflages with the sky which gives an illusion of more nature and less artificial construction.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
There's not much nature there, it's just empty sky. For simple comparison of what gives a stronger nature experience, just go out into a field and compare looking straight up to looking out across the field

patrickfatrick 7y ago

Seems like the first image is just looking for the areas of highest contrast, ie the completely overexposed areas of clouds against the darker building. Meanwhile the second photo lacks any areas of significant contrast. Bleh.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

This resonates with some of my experiences. When I had a corporate job, I worked in a large glassy building that wasn't a skyscraper. It was initially one story -- though tall for just one story because it was industrial scale and held more than a thousand employees (about two thousand, at least after the addition). The one story building reflected the sea of blacktop parking lots around it and appeared ominously black. They added a two-story addition to one end and moved my department there. It became clearer that the building appeared to be ominously black because of what it reflected. The taller part reflected the sky while its base still seemed ominously black. It became even clearer that this was so when they built a three-story building next door to house the IT department. That building mostly looked like floating clouds and blue sky. Very little of it seemed visually heavy and ominously dark. But they were equally hard to mentally process. It was hard to comprehend these buildings whose appearance morphed based on what was being reflected. It was hard to figure out where they began and ended, what they were made of, etc. It was not only disorienting, it was disturbing. It was a bit like working in a fun house mirror.

senozhatsky 7y ago

I like glassy buildings. Can stare at them for minutes; the article makes little sense to me. E.g. Hong Kong Harbour skyline, which is quite "glassy". Many people travel to take a look at it. [1] https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/SPLQhcPHF_u06LNEFd1qIc4p_3Q=/950x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-586892388-5c7b646fc9e77c0001d19d3b.jpg https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/SPLQhcPHF_u06LNEFd1qIc4p_3Q=/...

flexie 7y ago
This image shows the opposite of a glassy skyline. The only true glass building, which reflects sky and water, is the one just above the boat. The rest of the buildings are more traditional sky scrapers with mixed cladding.
- senozhatsky 7y ago
  Maybe. But I can count something like 6 or 7 buildings on that pic which look glassy to me. I'd say there are several glassy (which reflect sky and water) buildings there [1][2]. [1] https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7263112-panning-timelapse-video-victoria-harbour-hong-kong https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7263112-panning-time... [2] https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-27791884-victoria-harbor-hong-kong-14-june-2017 https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-27791884-victoria-ha... Edit: added more links.

EGreg 7y ago

I agree that, in general for everyday stuff, I prefer "down to earth" stuff like the gritty NYC in the 80s or SF of today, than glitzy skyscrapers. They seem too sterile. BUT in those photos, man, there are so many confounding variables. How about the fact that the sky is brighter than the skyscrapers, so you could be looking for where it is brighter? Secondly, there isn't much detail or variation on those "boxes", so your brain doesn't find that patch very interesting. And so on. There are plenty of skyscrapers people notice right away, e.g. the empire state building, the space needle, etc.

burfog 7y ago

They can reflect enough light to melt cars: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-skyscraper-Walkie-Talkie-melted-cars-reflecting-sunlight-fitted-shading.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-skys... https://wonderfulengineering.com/skyscraper-literally-melts-a-car-in-england/ https://wonderfulengineering.com/skyscraper-literally-melts-...

nabla9 7y ago

Perfect design for Evilcorp hq.

csomar 7y ago

Playing Devil's advocate: The glassy skyscrapers are a good design because you ignore them. So it's like they don't exist. On a more serious note, this is kinda of an isolated part of Boston city. It's a port that requires crossing the bridge. The bigger problem is that they are building huge buildings with no connection to the subway/metro network.

sulam 7y ago
Silver line goes there, but I’m not sure how useful that is.

kolinko 7y ago

Should we flag this post? The "science" presented in this article is so bad it deserves being called fake news. Like the commenters mentioned: - the photos are chosen in such a way that it's obvious eyes won't go looking into the buildings - there is no mention of the sample size regarding participants and photos that were shown. looks like cherrypicking

auslander 7y ago
Flagging should be removed from HN, or at least give an option to un-flag. Its a good interesting article. You stated your opinion in your comment. Why do you need to flag the post?

a_e_k 7y ago

Just for fun, here's how some of OpenCV's feature detectors handle the first image: AKAZE: https://imgur.com/EvcStcH https://imgur.com/EvcStcH ORB: https://imgur.com/YHSEDD7 https://imgur.com/YHSEDD7 I certainly wouldn't make any claims about what this says about the human visual system, but at least for these two algorithms they do seem to have troubles finding interesting key points to track on the buildings.

rb808 7y ago

I love 4 WTC, for some reason its extra-mirrory, really tall with a flat roof, from the street it often looks like it disappears. https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a212479bdf344d9S1000x700W0seB505153O/0ca546855e4bfa8001033dcaf223b2e4a70c6d68 https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a21247... https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e65aec3ec1aS1000x700W0seB505153O/9eed7b2022eca55b6a4eca675aac7b4f29099cb7 https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e6... https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e875b4702cf0S1000x700W0seB505153O/bb46f7a7a95d1ca70178bc178e148a9c4a3daff5 https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e87...

mcv 7y ago
I can't help but wonder how much of this is influenced by the lighting and composition of the photo. Both your examples and those in the article. I'm generally not a fan of the all-glass architecture, or even modern architecture in general, and prefer buildings made of stone, and preferably on a human scale, like 19th and early 20th century architecture. After the War, buildings became featureless and soulless, and when architects started making them look good from a distance or from the sky, and not up close. Designed to look good as a model but not something for real people to live in. Recent years have fortunately seen a return to more sensible architecture.
- rb808 7y ago
  Yes definitely that second pic is probably not great. One thing I think it does benefit from is being surrounded by other tall buildings, so often you can only see it from very close up and its that view in the first photo that I see nearly every day.

Havoc 7y ago

Feels like the wrong conclusion in submission title to me. Glass buildings are by their nature quite uniform & featureless. ...of course the brain looks elsewhere. And I don't think it's a given that it's a bad thing either. If you think about an ocean - people tend to look at the horizon not stare at the fairly uniform ocean surface. Nothing wrong with the ocean surface though

annsussman 7y ago

I'm the author of this article. These are good questions and comments; evolution's preset the way we take in surroundings and brain can't 'fixate' or focus on glassy facades; eye-tracking studies and emulation software used in article, show this. You can read more studies showing this here: https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/07/why-eye-track-boston-city-hall-to-see-evolution-at-work/ https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/07/why-eye-track-boston... And here: https://commonedge.org/game-changing-eye-tracking-studies-reveal-how-we-actually-see-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/game-changing-eye-tracking-studies-re... And if you're curious about why modern architecture is 'avoidant' here: https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod... LMK if you have questions; always open to discussing.