Feeling the urban project: the use of virtual reality for a perceptual approach of the urban climatic environment (original) (raw)
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2019
Sensory Urbanism is an experimental prototyping project exploring the potential of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments to support the incorporation of sensory and intangible aspects of place. The study investigates how sensory exploration of urban places can be integrated into decision making regarding the future of cities. In the past, numerous studies reported various sophisticated 'livability' measures, deeming to determine what makes a city a great place to live in. While a part of these measures can be quantified and be represented as text, graphs or images, most of the qualitative aspects of place are inherently abstract and sensory. These aspects have to be experienced to be understood and therefore they are extremely difficult to communicate using conventional representation means. The proposition explored in this study is that the increasing ubiquity of VR and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies can provide new opportunities to engage with the multi-sensory ...
Environmental Perception of Urban Spaces: Physical Versus Virtual Exploration
Civil Engineering and Architecture, 2023
The study aims to investigate virtual street view imagery as a tool for auditing and comprehending urban environments. The objective is to compare the physical and virtual exploration of urban spaces in terms of environmental perception. Previous research has been criticized for limiting itself to cognitive aspects of environmental perception. Accordingly, this study adopts a more holistic conceptualization of environmental perception and considers all cognitive, affective, interpretive, and evaluative aspects. A quasi-experiment was carried out in which 38 postgraduate and undergraduate architectural students were divided into two groups to explore sections of two different streets in Cairo, Egypt. Participants of each group explored a street section physically and, on another day, the other street section virtually through Google Street View. Data collection methods included perceptual sketches, cognitive maps, semantic differential questions, and paragraph writing. In relation to cognitive aspects of perception, results suggest that physical exploration permits a more complete and accurate reading and understanding of the urban environment than virtual exploration. In particular, it was found that, through physical exploration, participants tended to acquire a greater amount of information about the environment and had a better ability to estimate distances and heights than through virtual exploration. However, in virtual exploration, probably because of reduced amount of stimuli, participants were better able to notice some specific details such as, litter, and graffiti. In relation to affective, interpretive, and evaluative aspects of environmental perception, it was found that experiencing the environment in person allows capture the ambience of the place and form clear and strong impressions about the setting much more effectively than experiencing it virtually. Results showed that, during and after physical exploration, participants had a much greater tendency to express feelings and emotions about the environment and to formulate evaluations about its different components than during and after virtual exploration. In conclusion, it is suggested that virtual street view imagery exploration of the urban environment cannot replace actual physical exploration for a comprehensive and holistic audit of an urban space. However, virtual exploration could be used as a preliminary audit of an environment to acquire an initial understanding or as a more focused follow-up exploration to check or complete information about physical characteristics captured during a physical exploration.
2014
Computer visualisations are wide Q2 ly used to evaluate future urban environments in international compe-28 titions. Rapid technological progress in graphics computer software has enabled architects and landscape 29 planners to produce sophisticated images that are not only capable of transmitting the characteristics of 30 the future environment, they also manage to evoke in observers the sort of feelings and emotions which 31 can only be aroused by experiencing the space. This present paper attempts to identify the affective 32 responses that influence the evaluation of urban environment proposal, analysing the model of architects 33 and non-architects's preferences. A sample of 104 architects and 113 non-architects expressed their opin-34 ions on 48 urban computer simulations. The results show that for both groups the success of a digital 35 visualisation is associated to the feelings of innovation and wellbeing. However, their assessments differ 36 significantly because each group associates these feelings with different aspects. In general, architects are 37 more critical in their assessments. 38 Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. 39 40 65 favourable predisposition towards the architectural space that 66 the image represents. But, what affective response do these digital 67 images generate in observers?. Bearing in mind that in such plan-68 ning competitions, evaluators may be architects or non-architects, 69 are there significant differences between the evaluations from the 70 two groups?. 71 As early as 1956, Brunswik [1] suggested that the relational pro-72 cess between the stimulus and the opinion or judgment emitted by 73 the subject was an indirect one. Applied to the sphere of urban 74 design, this approach assumes that subjects respond to the partic-75 ular characteristics of the image, integrate these reactions into 76 affective impressions and transfer those affective impressions to 77 an aesthetic evaluation of the digital image as a whole. The deter-78 mination of affective impressions of the built environment has 79 been the object of numerous studies [2]. However, in most of these 80 works the symbolic meanings are defined a priori by researchers or 81 experts. The most commonly followed theoretical framework is the 82 one defined by Mehrabian and Russell [3]. These authors describe 83 affective response as having three basic underlying dimensions: 84 pleasure, arousal and dominance. The risk in using dimensions that 85 have been defined elsewhere, at other moments of time and with 86 other stimuli is that the concepts may not be appropriate for rep-87 resenting the conceptual structure of the observer being studied.
Experiential Virtual Urban Environments: A Preliminary Investigation
PLANNING MALAYSIA JOURNAL
Virtual reality (VR) technologies enable users to be virtually immersed in reconstructed cities and streets from around the globe. Immersive technologies could provide users a suggestive sensation of “being there” in a reconstructed virtual urban environments (VUE). This research argues that experiential VUE could promote better understanding of a place while offering unique interactions within its surrounding elements. The aim of this research is to present a preliminary study of the factors determining place experience in a VUE. This research examines two related VUE case studies that offer real-time navigation via a 3D virtual environment (VE) platform to analyse the functionality of the offered interactions and user experience via its contents. Although preliminary investigations have shown some promising results in real-time virtual city walkthroughs, there are still some issues that still need to be addressed in order to provide experiential contents. Based on the findings, th...
Mapping Ambiance. A synopsis of theory and practices in an interdisciplinary perspective
2016
Mapping Ambiances is a research carried out by an international and multidisciplinary team, involving research laboratories working within the themes of multisensory perception and experiential simulation, namely Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana “Fausto Curti” (DAStU, Politecnico di Milano, Milano – Italy) and CRENAU (UMR 1563 AAU CNRS/MCC/ECN Nantes – France), and the Department of Cultural Heritage and Environment (UniMi, Milano - Italy). The aim of the research is to give a wide and depth definition of the Ambiance notion, starting from interviews to researchers belonging to different disciplines that deal with urban issues. In order to define a comprehensive interdisciplinary methodology, the outcomes were analysed, systematically reorganized and represented from a disciplinary, thematic and geographical point of view. The final result allowed to define overlaps and discrepancies among disciplines and approaches from a theoretical and experimental perspective; this framework ha...
Archnet-IJAR, 2020
Purpose-The affectivity is conceptualised in the literary work of phenomenological theories as a significant factor in urban environments studies that are related to change people's feelings. This article aims to present toolkits for creating affective urban atmospheres, which is based on communications between people and place. Design/methodology/approach-To better comprehend the links between the felt body theory and reconstructing affective urban atmospheres in urban environments, this article has performed bibliographic investigations on the sensible approaches and presented Toolkit related to the multi-sensory experience. Findings-This article breaks new ground to discuss the concepts of the felt body, vital drive and daily multi-sensory experience as a contribution to urban studies applications. Research limitations/implications-This article clarified the possibility of creating affective urban atmospheres through the concepts of affectivity as a process at a pre-design stage. Originality/value-In conclusion, it is argued that work on multi-sensory experience in urban environments needs to address the felt body and vital drive to become a set of urban studies tools of perceptual dimension.
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Urban Design and Planning, 2020
This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for exploring the quality of affective atmospheres relevant to urban situations in city centre streets. This research study assumes that urban situations can shed light on how the urban form and everyday life experiences impact affective atmospheres. To examine this assumption, a snowballing technique was applied using the Google search engine and a systematic review of the SCImago database, identifying 21 books and 28 articles in 22 relevant journals. The results led to an initial urban design model exploring the perceptual quality of affective atmospheres in city centre streets. On the basis of the initial results, a model was built that proposes four dimensions and ten perceptual qualities and comprises visual, emotional (social experience), sensual (aesthetic experience) and spiritual design elements. The findings provide practical insight into the perceptual qualities of affective atmospheres through the integration of ten urban situations and five levels of urban design assessment tools. The concluding remarks highlight the role of the perceptual design dimensions shared by urban designers to present a model and framework with both reasonable and practical goals.
Capturing anr Reactiving ambience as a key issue in sensible Urban Planning
5TH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON AMBIANCES, 2024
As part of the 4th year of project teaching at the Ecole Nationale d'Architecture et d'Urbanisme in Tunis, our team strives to make students aware of the importance of sensitive, environment-oriented design. Our approach consists of adopting an analysis/project attitude based on field experiments. However, this project-oriented attitude - conscious and aiming to be useful - is somewhat contradictory to the very nature of the atmosphere - pure, a-conscious, sensitive vibration - that we are trying to capture. In addition, the reporting phase of the experiment represents a second challenge. How do you reproduce a feeling that is fleeting, labile and elusive? How do we capture this moment of resonance in concert with the atmosphere? A third challenge is that of the project phase, which aims to reactivate atmospheres that are still present on the ground but have faded over time. In this paper, we wish to report
SHS Web of Conferences
The concept of “ambiance” has been shaped over the years by questioning the interactions between three attractors: architecture and the city, climatic and sound phenomena, uses and perception. Studied in pairs, each of these attractors refers to very different disciplinary fields; architecture and phenomena concern the physics of the city, architecture and uses interest sociology and uses and phenomena are rather turned to comfort. Studies concerning ambiances are therefore highly interdisciplinary and raise many questions: living spaces, urban renewal and heritage, urban prospective and the city as a stage. For this, many conceptual and technical tools are mobilized: digital tools for simulation and immersion, investigation, surveys and storytelling, prototyping, field action. What may be new in the field of academic studies is the awareness of artistic creation as a resource for the use of digital tools, storytelling and the representation of complexity through original means.
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Journal of Urban Design, 2008
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