The urban environment is defined by the interaction between the city morphological characteristics and its physical behavior based on the human interpretation. Contemporary psychology emphasizes the relation between perception and action and shows that perception can be enhanced by the receptor's motion. Basing our work on these principles, we assume that virtual reality techniques, bringing both immersion and interaction to static computer generated images can be of use to study solar effects and therefore daylight ambience. In this paper, we show the methodology for solar effects analysis in both real and virtual world and build demonstrators to compare the emergence of solar effects.
INTRODUCTIONThe urban environment is defined by the interaction between the city morphological characteristics and its physical behavior (lighting phenomenon) based on the human interpretation (cognition). Contemporary psychology emphasizes the relation between perception and action and confirms that perception can be enhanced by the receptor's motion [6]. Psychophysical interaction creates a complex urban space that might be fully understood by over-layering the perceived information we gather while walking and moving. In the architectural and urban field, several studies analyze the urban space with visual dynamic perception. These studies prove that walking can be a tool for reading and evaluating public space [7,3]. Most of these studies however ignore the physical impact on that evaluation, and especially the impact of light on visual perception. They are limited to existing built environment and therefore impossible to apply at design phase.Virtual Reality techniques allow virtually changing space, time and interaction type. Thus, the use of virtual environments has become an opportunity to realize series of "controlled" experiments, disconnected from the real world in which it might be particularly difficult to reproduce the same situation.Our goal is to develop an immersive tool that uses dynamic visual perception to determine the impact of the solar effects on space acknowledgement, i.e. we try to evaluate urban daylighting by using VR techniques: we attempt to compare solar effects visual perception in a real urban path with its representation in a virtual one in order to extract the characteristics of those effects. As our first experiments lacked of free motion for the observer, we have built a new demonstrator introducing the virtual guide metaphor [2] in order to get better interaction and thus immersion.
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