Evaluation of the Impact of Rural Streetscape Enhancement on Relaxation-Arousal Responses Based on EEG and VR 

Abstract

Targeting the issue of emotional deficiency in rural human environments, this study combines electroencephalogram (EEG) and virtual reality (VR) technologies thus we choose as experimental images the current situation scenes of five rural main street nodes as well as the comparative transformation scenes. It then assesses the subjects' subjective cognition and level of relaxation-arousal responses using the α/β index in the EEG data and the three subjective scale indexes of "Interested," "Comfortable," and "Sense of vitality." The study's findings demonstrated that: 1. All three scores increased in the transformation scenarios, and subjects' subjective assessments varied significantly across all five sets of scenes. 2. Every transformation scene showed relaxation responses in comparison to status quo scenes, except for the T8 electrode, which displayed the only arousal response in the second set of scenes, out of all the α/β index values that were substantially different. 3. The Pz electrode in the parietal lobe area was found to be the most sensitive to the visual response to the green landscape and the form of the building façade along the street, and the T8 electrode in the right temporal lobe area was the most sensitive to the response to the overall perception of the surrounding environment, according to a comparison of the longitudinal α/β values. More options for rural streetscape design as well as fresh insights and methodologies for assessing the rural human environment in the future are anticipated from this study.