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

Abstract

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.

Design Decision Support for Healthcare Architecture: A VR-Integrated Approach for Measuring User Perception

“…The approach went beyond the work of White et al [30], who utilized 360-degree videos and spatial audio as immersive virtual environments investigating public perceptions of streetscape design, and Lin et al's work [27], which employed CAVE as a semi-immersive virtual environment discussing healthcare environment design between a design team and medical staff. Recent research has begun to utilize VR in healthcare facility design, yet studies engaging especially vulnerable groups like stroke survivors, to gain their perspectives on built environment design are limited [3,22,23].…”

“…The overall workflow of the approach is described in the flowchart graphic (Figure 1), which adopts the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard flowchart symbols to represent the process, decision, data, document, database, and terminator [29]. The overall method is based upon White et al's study for TfNSW, which investigated informing streetscape design with public perceptions using immersive virtual reality [30], which includes five key steps, including identifying the variables, constructing a digital 3D street model, building an online survey with the embedded environments with revealed preference, recruiting participants, and analyzing the results. Another study this approach was based on is Lin et al's study that integrated BIM, game engine, and VR technology for healthcare design in 2018 [27]; in this study, the team developed a database-supported, VR/BIM-based communication and simulation (DVBCS) system integrated with BIM, game engines, and VR technologies for healthcare design in a semi-immersed VR environment.…”

Urban virtual environment landscape design and system based on PSO-BP neural network

“…Virtual reality technology and neural network models have just emerged. White M and other scholars use virtual reality technology to design street scenes to provide safe and comfortable walking conditions for pedestrians 15 . Ehab A and other scholars used immersive design to compare human interaction in the real and virtual elevated urban spaces of London Sky Garden, and explored the geographical virtual language landscape of Dublin urban area, providing an important reference for urban design 16 , 17 .…”

Safety Perception Evaluation of Civil Aviation Based on Weibo Posts in China: An Enhanced Large-Scale Group Decision-Making Framework

“…As early as 1997, Williamson et al [15] studied about perceptions and attitudes towards safety climate, and his research was conducted with the aim of producing a measure regarding perceptions and attitudes towards safety as an indicator towards safety culture for the working population. Subsequently, the attention of a wide range of scholars on safety perception gradually increased, resulting in the relevant research areas expanded to transportation [16][17][18][19], tourism [20][21][22], food safety [23], medical staff [24][25][26], and environment [27,28]. Relevant studies on safety perceptions also exist in the field of air transportation.…”