Algorithm Maps The Most Beautiful Route To Where You’re Going

I would love to see (and use) this in more locations. Sadly, it will likely be quickly perverted to route visitors to/near shops and other unattractive locales.

If you want to find the most scenic route to get somewhere, there may soon be an app for that. Daniele Quercia and colleagues at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona have come up with a way to create a crowd-sourced measure of a city’s beauty, and made an algorithm to find the prettiest way to get from one point to another. “The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant,” the scientists told Technology Review:

Quercia and co begin by creating a database of images of various parts of the center of London taken from Google Street View and Geograph, both of which have reasonably consistent standards of images. They then crowd-sourced opinions about the beauty of each location using a website called UrbanGems.org.
Each visitor to UrbanGems sees two photographs and chooses the one which shows the more beautiful location. That gives the team a crowd-sourced opinion about the beauty of each location. They then plot each of these locations and their beauty score on a map which they use to provide directions.

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