The influence of landmarks and urban form on cognitive maps using virtual reality

Abstract

Landmarks are universal components of human urbanization. We are a species driven to mark the land with symbolic structures and craft meaning in our built environments. From ancient wonders such as Stonehenge to modern icons like the St. Louis Arch, we have been designing landmarks since the dawn of civilization. Cities, towns, and neighborhoods incorporate landmarks as elements of cultural expression and tools for navigation. Individuals use landmarks as reference points to create an internal cognitive map, permitting more efficient navigation throughout a city and contributing to a heightened sense of place. To aid in research regarding the role of landmarks on cognitive maps and place-identity, we have designed a novel testing paradigm in which subjects wear a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) and traverse a hypothetical urban environment using a gaming controller. The virtual environment (VE) features a gridded street network measuring 5x5 blocks and guides subjects along a fixed route through residential, park, commercial and industrial districts. Along this fixed route, subjects are exposed to ten distinct landmarks. After navigating the VE, subjects are tasked with delineating their perceived route, landmark locations, and district boundaries through map drawing tasks on grid paper as well as a scene recognition task. The most significant finding revealed landmark configuration accuracy to be highly correlated with performance on the route recall and moderately correlated with performance on the scene recognition task. This suggests that, regardless of the landmark type, individuals who more precisely recalled landmark locations also navigated the route and identified scenes more accurately. Landscape and urban planners can leverage these findings to advocate for the strategic inclusion of landmarks throughout an urban fabric, which we term Landmark Configuration Plans (LCP).

Mapping landscape spaces: Methods for understanding spatial-visual characteristics in landscape design

“…With the development of digital technology, digital visual representations are becoming more widely used in the field of landscape research and design such as photomontages, computer models, 2D and 3D photorealistic visualizations, as well as real time interactive presentations, and virtual reality (VR) environments (e.g. Ervin, 2001;Dinkov and Vatseva, 2016;Bianchetti, 2017;Lin et al, 2018;Bruns and Chamberlain, 2019). They are widely used to help mimic existing or proposed landscapes, and assess or predict environmental/landscape change.…”

Supplemental Material for Country roads through 1s and 0s: Sense of place for and recollection of West Virginia following long-term engagement with Fallout 76.

“…The interpreted findings and speculations about the role of presence in SoP hold implications for a range of behavioral outcomes, such as emotional health (e.g., diversions associated with temporary escapes from daily stress; Reinecke, 2009) and tourism (connecting with a space which may then drive motivations to actually visit the locale; Xu et al, 2013). SoP has been investigated in educational settings (Park, 2018;Wen & Looi, 2019), and might also be useful in helping craft a deeper understanding of how users experience fully virtual experiences (Bruns & Chamberlain, 2019). Rizzo et al (2009) rendered authentic places as part of virtual reality exposure therapy (in his work, for treating military veterans coping with posttraumatic stress disorder), and this work could be augmented with a deeper understanding of SoP for both the virtual worlds and their real-world analogs.…”

Revisiting architectural landmarks

“…This is especially true for cities that sit on the banks of large rivers or other bodies of water. Predominant heights close the perspectives of streets, lend originality and compositional integrity to city squares, and add sharpness and variety to streets lined with regular buildings [6,7].…”