Feeling the urban project: the use of virtual reality for a perceptual approach of the urban climatic environment

Résumé En

Virtual reality thanks to immersion and interaction is a good tool to assess urban environments. Allowing users to freely navigate in the virtual environment, virtual reality permits to take into account the influence of dynamic elements and the observers’ actions in the perception of urban spaces. However, previous works have shown that virtual assessments of urban projects are mainly based on visual experience. Thus, the multisensory perception of the actual environment is biased. In order to tackle this issue, we propose to focus on climatic ambiances, which are dynamic and multisensory. Moreover some studies have shown the importance of these factors in the appropriation of an urban space whereas they are very seldom integrated in virtual evaluations. This paper presents a new methodology to delineate urban climatic ambiances in virtual environments which respects the following points: understanding and perception of climatic ambiances by non-experts, sensitive evaluation of the urban space, presence in the virtual scene and perceptual fidelity of the virtual environment. Then we apply this methodology to design ten virtual scenes with climatic effects. These scenes have been assessed in a perceptual experiment involving 42 participants. This experiment helps to improve our knowledge of perception in virtual environments in order to improve or propose new cues for sensitive climatic suggestion in VR.