Towards a Sensitive Urban Wind Representation in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Wind can influence people’s behavior and their way of inhabiting an architectural or urban space. Furthermore, virtual reality (VR) enables the simulation of different physical and sensitive phenomena such as the wind. We aim to analyze the effects of different wind representations in terms of perception of its properties and sense of presence in VR. We carry out two within-subject studies aiming at evaluating different wind representation suggestions (including audiovisual and tactile stimuli) to identify their effects on wind properties’ perception and sense of presence in the VR scene. Our analysis showed significant effects of tactile restitution over the visual effects used in the study, both for understanding wind properties and for increasing the sense of presence in the VR scene. The tactile condition (T) reduced the estimation error of wind direction by 27% compared to the visual condition (V). The wind force error was reduced by 9.8% using (T) with (V). (T) increased the sense of presence by 12.2% compared to (V). Our second experiment showed an overestimation of the wind force perceived compared to the reference value of the Beaufort scale. For the maximum force value evaluated, the average result was 91% higher than the reference value, while for the lower, the average answer was 77% higher than the reference value. Previous studies have evaluated wind rendering in virtual reality, and others have studied the visualization of wind simulation results. To our knowledge, our study is the first to compare the perception of these two types of representations as well as the effects of wind on elements of the context. We also compared the wind perception to a reference-based method, the Beaufort scale.