Papers
Kurashiki Viewer: Qualitative Evaluations Of Architectural Spaces Inside Virtual Reality
Taro Narahara New Jersey Institute of Technology
This paper discusses how virtual reality (VR) environments can be employed as a data collection tool beyond visualization and representation tools through a simple experiment in a VR space and speculates about its potential applications. Using a VR model that runs on a web browser based on an existing historic town in Japan called Kurashiki, the experiment asked 30 recruited participants to freely walk around and leave ratings on a 5-point scale on any buildings or objects appealing to them. Our system can display points of interest of multiple participants using heatmaps superimposed on a map that can help users visually understand statistical preferences among them. Our goal is to provide a quantitative means for qualitative values of architectural and urban spaces, making such data more shareable. We intended to show that such a platform could help multiple stakeholders reach better consensuses and possibly collect training datasets for machine learning models that could extract features related to the attractiveness in architecture and urban spaces.
Keywords: Virtual Reality; Subjective Evaluation; Crowdsourcing; Sdg 10; Sdg 11.