Immersive virtual reality in community planning: Acoustic and visual congruence of simulated vs real world

The Europe2020 document indicates a new strategy to turn EU into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. Governments have established several principles and priorities for growth that include sustainable development, participation, and decentralization. Participatory planning is an important tool to strengthen the legitimacy of the policy and the decision making. To make this possible, decisions and design choices should be accepted and tested by the different participants of the community, stakeholders, experts and even non-experts, as ordinary citizens. This process would be facilitated if people could really assess the complex multisensory variables of the environment, such as those represented by the acoustic and visual parameters. The aim of the present study was to understand if acoustic and visual stimuli of an simulated environment in immersive virtual reality (IVR) were sufficiently congruent with their correspondent elements in the real context. After experiencing in real and laboratory settings, two independent groups of participants were, respectively, invited to fill out questionnaires concerning: global qualitative evaluations, coherence and familiarity for acoustic and visual stimuli. Our findings showed that modern multisensory IVR technologies can successfully represent a smart and innovative tool for enhancing the participatory planning, predicting the impact on community and their complex environment. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.