What If You Could Choose Between the Fastest Route and the Most Beautiful?

Mapping apps are a fantastic tool, but they can be a little soulless. They'll get you from point A to point B quickly, but the route itself might make for a garbage-strewn, treeless journey. After all, how could a mapping service know how to take the scenic value of a route into account when calculating directions? Soon, one might.

Inspired in part by psychogeography theory (which emphasizes playfulness in travel), a group of researchers from Yahoo! Labs in Barcelona in collaboration with University of Torino sought to add a bit of pep to these services. In a newly released paper, they explore how mapping apps could theoretically generate short walking routes that are more beautiful or quiet than standard offerings.