Urban accessibility visualized through neon genesis evangelion inspired interface
Santiago's A.T. Field: Visualizing Urban Accessibility through an Evangelion-Inspired Interface
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Urban accessibility problems are hard to understand, so the authors created a tool inspired by a science-fiction show's diagnostic screen to make these problems clearer. They transformed fictional elements from the show's interface into real data about city access using a special method called E2SFCA. The project revealed challenges like balancing bright colors with easy viewing and managing animation without distracting users. This work shows how a fictional design can be turned into a practical tool, but also highlights some trade-offs in making it accessible and respectful.
What this means in practice
- •For urban planners: Use a sci-fi inspired interactive tool to analyze and visualize accessibility challenges in urban areas based on real data.
- •For user interface designers: Design interfaces balancing dynamic visual features with accessibility concerns such as color-vision deficiency and reduced-motion preferences.
Authors
Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Ignacio Pérez-Messina, Claudio Gaete
Abstract
Science-fiction interfaces are often reproduced for their appearance, and their diagnostic logic is rarely rebuilt around real data. Here we describe Santiago's A.T. Field, an interactive visualization of urban accessibility built from a diagnostic interface in Episode 13 of Neon Genesis Evangelion. We translated that interface in five stages: phenomenon, field, progression, interface, and response. A microscopic Angel became a relational urban problem, and a fictional scanning lattice became an accessibility field computed with the E2SFCA method. Every element of the fictional display is tied to a quantity of the model. Three tensions appeared when we made the fictional language operational: the saturated palette of the genre against color-vision deficiency, the motion of the genre against the reduced-motion preference, and the per-frame cost of the animation. The urgency of the fictional command center has its own cost, because emergency aesthetics can cast urban populations as threats. These three tensions are what the translation cost, and they are what transfers to other attempts of this kind.