An immersive, multisensory and interactive approach for landscape study in virtual environments: the wind turbines’ case

Nowadays, where public projects are more and more committed to sustainable development, the user perception become a determinant factor for the decision-making process. This paper targets to evaluate the use of an immersive, multisensory and interactive method based on virtual reality (VR) system in order to study human behaviour and perception. Today, non-immersive, non-interactive and mono-sensory (visual) representation tools are rather used to explain the project to inexperienced users which do not tally with the immersive and interactive user’s experience of the real public space. Wind turbines (WT) are used as a landscape case study because they are disputed and the present impacts’ studies do not take into account the multisensory and dynamic aspect of the object, neither the dynamic point of view of the observer. A VR approach is here proposed thanks to immersion and interaction potentialities in order to assess dynamic and multisensory WT impacts. For that, a comparison between a real park and the same virtual one is needed to evaluate impacts restitution and biases. The real and virtual parks are evaluated using an immersive path-based method (perception in motion) and interaction in the virtual world is done through an instrumented bicycle. Results confirmed for one, the importance of human motion restitution in landscape studies; and for another, the participation of landscape, by multi-sensory modalities and dynamics (e.g. temporal dimension, physical factors, shapes), to construct the perceived space. The VR approach demonstrates then good potentials for sustainable landscape aims: a communication and discussion tool in the decision-making process.