Exploring Issues of Immersive Virtual Landscapes for Participatory Spatial Planning Support

Virtual Reality (VR) allows for an immersion into virtual landscapes. This immersion may offer advantages to communicating and assessing 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 VR presented with the head mounted display Oculus Rift DK2 through guided interviews with and observation of study participants. 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.