Exploring Issues of Immersive Virtual Landscapes for the Support of Participatory Spatial Planning Support

Virtual Reality (VR) allows an immersion into virtual landscapes. This immersion may offer advantages to communicate and assess landscape change in participatory planning. In an explorative study we prepared and presented GIS-based immersive VR in order to identify technical and practical issues as well as potentials of immersive VR as planning media. We assessed the effect of two different VRs presented with the head mounted display Oculus Rift DK2 through guided interviews with study participants and their observation. The results show that perceiving the VR from a pedestrian's perspective and exploring it individually supported the participant’s presence in the virtual scene. The visual level of realism and the navigation were identified as crucial issues as low quality of these aspects distracted participants significantly. As the immersive VR proved useful to activate people assessing the landscape in the VR, further research should focus on identifying suitable and valid immersive VR for quality assessment of landscape change from a user’s perspective.

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