Application of human-scale immersive VR system for environmental design assessment - A proposal for an architectural design evaluation tool

In order to improve the quality of everyday life in urban areas, it is important to properly design public spaces such as plazas and streets where urban residents spend many hours during commuting and their spare time. One of the hardest problems at the initial stage of environmental design is the verification and evaluation of the planning of environmental space before actual construction. The virtual reality (VR) technology could be one of the solutions for this kind of problem. Although several technologies have been introduced, such as head-mounted display (HMD) and PC-monitor-based VR (including web-3D)), the lack of a sense of presence, as well as interaction methods are still unresolved issues. Therefore, we are suggesting the use of a multiprojection display system with multimodal interfaces, which is our original system for virtual experience, as a potential candidate to solve the lack of presence and interaction. In this study, several experiments related to urban environmental design evaluation have been carried out. The first was about the evaluation and verification of public space design such as those of arcades and eaves above streets between high-rise buildings. The result showed that there was an emotional release from the oppressive feeling in the streets between high-rise buildings when an appropriate arcade design was adopted compared with when no arcade was adopted. The second was about human behavior in public open spaces concerning seat preference in public squares and the distribution of the surrounding people. Furthermore, we carried out several basic psychophysical experiments on human distance perception in virtual space, which revealed the compression of distance perception in VR space. In this paper, we also introduce one of the main points of this study, which is the unique and elaborate cooperative relationship between architectural and nonarchitectural departments of our university when conducting human behavior experiments using heavily computer-oriented devices. To carry out the experiments, the multiprojector display system, D-vision, which has a 180 degrees viewing angle, and the original navigation interface, Turn-table, were used to provide a high sense of presence and high-resolution images to the user.