# Exploring Virtual Environments to Assess the Quality of Public Spaces
## 6 Conclusions  
In this paper, the attempt to implement methods used to characterize public space elements for public auditing of urban places in a future district was investigated. A professional BIM software to build a 3D city model of a large district still under construction was used, focusing on three POVs. For each POV, a VR-immersive visit displayed on an HTC Vive HMD and a real video of one minute each was proposed to participants, followed  
Figure 8: The three selected points of view of LaVallee. The first line is the virtual environment, second line is the reality scene. by a set of questions. The results support the valid use of VR-IV to assess the walkability and cyclability of a neighborhood based on several architectural proposals, especially because the ability of the place to be walked or cycled is fairly consistent between video and VR-IV. However, an overestimation of place quality is associated with VR-IV. This overestimation could be reduced by improving VR photorealism. Given the paucity of studies in this area, we can only hope that more research will be carried out in the near future. While the results of the study were quite promising, illustrating clear indications of feasibility on some fronts and potential for improvements on others, there are clearly some extensions that could be made for added value. The first limitation of the work presented here is methodological. We have kept the same participants for the two conditions in order to limit the effect of inter-subjective differences but we were not able, for technical reasons, to counterbalance the order of presentation of the conditions. In a new experiment, we would take care to leave some time between the video and VR-IV in order to limit the possible impact of one visualization on another. A first perspective to this study would be to enrich the set of questions to allow for a more explanatory characterization of urban streetscapes. Indeed, it has been found in [26] that direct questioning of participants about the emotion brought by various environments was not discriminative of places. A second perspective could be to use a more diverse sample. Our study only included young participants with no particular mobility difficulties. Interviewing people who were less comfortable walking or cycling, such as the elderly, would no doubt alter the assessments made. Experimenting with a wider range of people would help to ensure more inclusive walkability. Another interesting perspective for this work would be to include data relating to other sensory modalities in the evaluation. At present, the VR-IVs and the videos have been designed solely from a visual point of view. Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of bodily, auditory [32; 33; 34], and olfactory sensations [35; 36] in the evaluation of an urban landscape. The auditory modality remains the easiest to integrate initially. Future research could investigate the extension of the protocol for the comparison of two kinds of immersive environments: panoramic videos of the reality of a built environment in an HMD versus a virtual environment of the same streetscape in an HMD. It would be an opportunity to compare immersive 3D setups and to evaluate the eventual gains and drawbacks of the virtual environment versus the real environment. This could explain whether the differences observed in our study are linked to the lack of realism of virtual reality representations or to its more immersive nature. Finally, a last perspective of this work is to compare the virtual visit with the reality tours once the district is built by asking questions to real residents. Previous studies compared reality scenes in street view images versus audits by local residents and onsite inspection [20]. We would like to compare the virtual environment in an HMD versus an onsite survey (instead of reality videos). It would be the opportunity to validate more extensively and enhance the use of immersive environments for the public auditing of existing or future built environments. Conceptualization, R.B.