Informing Streetscape Design with Citizen Perceptions of Safety and Place: An Immersive Virtual Environment E-Participation Method

As our cities grow, it is important to develop policies and streetscape designs that provide pedestrians with safe comfortable walking conditions and acknowledge the challenges involved in making urban places feel liveable and safe while understanding the critical role of streets around busy destinations. To understand these challenges at a nuanced, human level, new methods of citizen engagement are needed. This paper outlines the development and application of a new citizen perception collection method, using immersive virtual environments (IVE), coupled with an interactive emoji affective activation-pleasure grid and digital slider elements, embedded within an online e-participation survey to quantify, and rank the impact of individual (single-variable) urban design elements and safe system treatments on pedestrians’ perceptions of safety and place. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method for providing detailed, interrogable, scalable citizen perception data of a variety of urban street design elements and safe system treatments, which allows a statistical analysis of responses and prioritization of the most effective pedestrian-oriented interventions for maintaining or enhancing street vibrancy and liveability. Our IVE e-participation approach is an important contribution to forming a better understanding of streetscapes and provides a valuable method for urban designers and transport planners to prioritise different streetscape place and safety approaches.

[1]  Joana C Carmo,et al.  A Systematic Review of Normative Studies Using Images of Common Objects , 2020, Frontiers in Psychology.

[2]  Anjali Joseph,et al.  Using Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) to Conduct Environmental Design Research: A Primer and Decision Framework , 2020, HERD.

[3]  D. Pojani,et al.  Urban design quality and walkability: an audit of suburban high streets in an Australian city , 2020, Journal of Urban Design.

[4]  Ralf Bill,et al.  Combining VR Visualization and Sonification for Immersive Exploration of Urban Noise Standards , 2019, Multimodal Technol. Interact..

[5]  Jan B. F. van Erp,et al.  EmojiGrid: A 2D Pictorial Scale for the Assessment of Food Elicited Emotions , 2018, Front. Psychol..

[6]  Ralf Bill,et al.  Validity of VR Technology on the Smartphone for the Study of Wind Park Soundscapes , 2018, ISPRS Int. J. Geo Inf..

[7]  Ludger Klimek,et al.  Visual analogue scales (VAS): Measuring instruments for the documentation of symptoms and therapy monitoring in cases of allergic rhinitis in everyday health care , 2017, Allergo Journal International.

[8]  Alberto Betella,et al.  The Affective Slider: A Digital Self-Assessment Scale for the Measurement of Human Emotions , 2016, PloS one.

[9]  Chris Webster,et al.  Exploring associations between urban green, street design and walking: Results from the Greater London boroughs , 2015 .

[10]  Austin Troy,et al.  Effects of skeletal streetscape design on perceived safety , 2015 .

[11]  Boris M. Velichkovsky,et al.  The perception of egocentric distances in virtual environments - A review , 2013, ACM Comput. Surv..

[12]  Reid Ewing,et al.  Measuring Urban Design: Metrics for Livable Places , 2013 .

[13]  Sarah H. Creem-Regehr,et al.  Effect of viewing plane on perceived distances in real and virtual environments. , 2012, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[14]  P. Hekkert,et al.  The emotion slider: A self-report device for the continuous measurement of emotion , 2009, 2009 3rd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and Workshops.

[15]  Laurence Nigay,et al.  The Engineering of Mixed Reality Systems , 2009, Human-Computer Interaction Series.

[16]  Susan L Handy,et al.  Measuring the Unmeasurable: Urban Design Qualities Related to Walkability , 2009 .

[17]  Michael Wimmer,et al.  Bimodal task-facilitation in a virtual traffic scenario through spatialized sound rendering , 2008, ACM Trans. Appl. Percept..

[18]  Tapio Lokki,et al.  Navigation with auditory cues in a virtual environment , 2005, IEEE MultiMedia.

[19]  Marc Aurel Schnabel,et al.  Spatial Understanding in Immersive Virtual Environments , 2003 .

[20]  Anne Vernez Moudon,et al.  Walking and Bicycling: An Evaluation of Environmental Audit Instruments , 2003, American journal of health promotion : AJHP.

[21]  John Zacharias,et al.  Pedestrian Behavior Pedestrian Behavior and Perception in Urban Walking Environments , 2001 .

[22]  J. Loomis,et al.  Immersive virtual environment technology as a basic research tool in psychology , 1999, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[23]  Michael J. Singer,et al.  Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire , 1998, Presence.

[24]  M. White,et al.  A Ladder-truss of Citizen Participation: Re-imagining Arnstein’s ladder to bridge between the community and sustainable urban design outcomes , 2021, J. of Design Research.

[25]  Peter W. Newton,et al.  Urban regeneration and urban fabrics in Australian cities , 2016 .

[26]  Louis Laja Uggah,et al.  Overcoming the Uncanny Valley Theory in Digital CharactersBased on Human Attitudes , 2015 .

[27]  Mendel Kleiner,et al.  Auditory-Induced Presence in Mixed Reality Environments and Related Technology , 2010, The Engineering of Mixed Reality Systems.

[28]  Jordan J. Louviere,et al.  Modeling the choices of individual decision-makers by combining efficient choice experiment designs with extra preference information , 2008 .

[29]  H. Schifferstein.  The perceived importance of sensory modalities in product usage: a study of self-reports. , 2006, Acta psychologica.

[30]  G. A. Mendelsohn,et al.  Affect grid : A single-item scale of pleasure and arousal , 1989 .