Virtual Reality as a Landscape Decision-Making Tool: the Wind Turbines’ Case

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise at any time without prior written permission from the publisher europia Productions. As public projects are more and more committed to sustainable development, users become determinant actors for the decision-making process. This paper aims to make a first step for using Virtual Reality (VR) as an evaluation tool for landscape project. For that, it will evaluate the immersive, interactive and multisensory user's experience of landscape thanks to (VR) and to determine potentialities and biases of such system. We base our work on the particular case of Wind turbines (WT) which are famous for the public controversy they have raised about their visual, acoustic and even social impacts. We compare human perception of a real wind turbine park and of the same virtual one in order to evaluate impacts restitution. An instrumented bicycle is used for in vitro interaction restitution. Results confirm the relevance and importance of human motion restitution in landscape studies; Moreover, the participation of landscape, by multi-sensory modalities and dynamics (e.g. temporal dimension, physical factors, shapes) to construct the perceived space is also shown. Virtual Reality demonstrates good potentials for sustainable landscape studies as a communication and discussion tool, as a required step of the decision-making process. 1 Introduction Sustainability concerns are about favouring a better future to all humans: user is henceforth the purpose of all political, economical and social actions. It means that every action must understand the people for whom the action is directed and answer to their relevant needs. The best way to understand one's desire is to ask him; that is why today, in landscape and urban planning, the user participates as a decision-maker in public projects. He has to express his desired vision of the world by assessing the proposed representation of the project; that means the user must perceive the same world once constructed. In this paper, we propose VR as a new representation and discussion tool for sustainable landscape projects thanks to perception restitution potentialities. Landscape results from the 'observer-environment' interaction; it is a multisensory perception that changes depending on observer's point of view and motion. 1 Perceptual assessment of rural space rarely uses an immersive and dynamic point of view contrary to some urban methods, which study observer's …