Stomper, thank you very much
Stomper, thank you very much for your ideas.
Yes, I had mentioned earlier that objective measurement of roughness would be complicated by the softness of the underlying material, and I agree with you that it makes a huge difference in how that surface is perceived.
I've discarded the crayon rubbing and whitespace approach because of significant problems detailed earlier in the thread. That's how we came to focusing on perceptions only, at least for now. If you or others come up with workable, low-tech ways to measure roughness objectively, then we can also go in that direction. For the time being, I'm out of ideas on that front.
I agree with you that speed should correlate fairly strongly with perceived roughness. If we could measure several runners' speeds on different surfaces it would be a great unobtrusive, behavioral measure of roughness. Logistically, however, this is more challenging than what I've most recently proposed. First, some runners (myself included, sadly) aren't able to run on the full variety of surfaces. Walk or stand on them yes, but run, maybe not. Second, it would require a location where you have sufficient lengths of the different surfaces to permit a reasonable length of running. We'd need a timer at each spot, and the different surfaces couldn't be that far apart from each other.
It might be possible to compare two or three surfaces in a race, say, but the problems there are differences in speed over the course of the race (due to a variety of factors shared by runners and unique to individual runners) and the limited number of different surfaces. And we'd still need timers at the different spots.
In principle, what you propose is a pretty direct and elegant solution. In practice, my guess is that it's pretty complicated to implement. But maybe you have ideas about how to do it better than I've mentioned here.
Studies of perceptions and studies of speed would complement each other. It's possible that once we had a reasonably good perceived roughness scale (with fairly complete examples), that runners could contribute their own data. For instance, this is how fast I ran on surface X, Y, and Z, etc. It would be less controlled, but we could get an approximate indication of ratios (such as, my speed is 50% slower on surface B than surface A) and this might be able to be summarized across individuals.
If we were able to perform some sort of speed study successfully, it
Stomper, thank you very much for your ideas.
Yes, I had mentioned earlier that objective measurement of roughness would be complicated by the softness of the underlying material, and I agree with you that it makes a huge difference in how that surface is perceived.
I've discarded the crayon rubbing and whitespace approach because of significant problems detailed earlier in the thread. That's how we came to focusing on perceptions only, at least for now. If you or others come up with workable, low-tech ways to measure roughness objectively, then we can also go in that direction. For the time being, I'm out of ideas on that front.
I agree with you that speed should correlate fairly strongly with perceived roughness. If we could measure several runners' speeds on different surfaces it would be a great unobtrusive, behavioral measure of roughness. Logistically, however, this is more challenging than what I've most recently proposed. First, some runners (myself included, sadly) aren't able to run on the full variety of surfaces. Walk or stand on them yes, but run, maybe not. Second, it would require a location where you have sufficient lengths of the different surfaces to permit a reasonable length of running. We'd need a timer at each spot, and the different surfaces couldn't be that far apart from each other.
It might be possible to compare two or three surfaces in a race, say, but the problems there are differences in speed over the course of the race (due to a variety of factors shared by runners and unique to individual runners) and the limited number of different surfaces. And we'd still need timers at the different spots.
In principle, what you propose is a pretty direct and elegant solution. In practice, my guess is that it's pretty complicated to implement. But maybe you have ideas about how to do it better than I've mentioned here.
Studies of perceptions and studies of speed would complement each other. It's possible that once we had a reasonably good perceived roughness scale (with fairly complete examples), that runners could contribute their own data. For instance, this is how fast I ran on surface X, Y, and Z, etc. It would be less controlled, but we could get an approximate indication of ratios (such as, my speed is 50% slower on surface B than surface A) and this might be able to be summarized across individuals.
If we were able to perform some sort of speed study successfully, it
