  New research cutting across architecture, urban studies, and psychology is
contextualizing the understanding of urban spaces according to the perceptions
of their inhabitants. One fundamental construct that relates place and
experience is ambiance, which is defined as "the mood or feeling associated
with a particular place". We posit that the systematic study of ambiance
dimensions in cities is a new domain for which multimedia research can make
pivotal contributions. We present a study to examine how images collected from
social media can be used for the crowdsourced characterization of indoor
ambiance impressions in popular urban places. We design a crowdsourcing
framework to understand suitability of social images as data source to convey
place ambiance, to examine what type of images are most suitable to describe
ambiance, and to assess how people perceive places socially from the
perspective of ambiance along 13 dimensions. Our study is based on 50,000
Foursquare images collected from 300 popular places across six cities
worldwide. The results show that reliable estimates of ambiance can be obtained
for several of the dimensions. Furthermore, we found that most aggregate
impressions of ambiance are similar across popular places in all studied
cities. We conclude by presenting a multidisciplinary research agenda for
future research in this domain.
