Visual characteristics of urban environments influence human perception and behavior, including choices for living, recreation and modes of transportation. Although geospatial visualizations hold great potential to better inform urban planning and design, computational methods are lacking to realistically measure and model urban and parkland viewscapes at sufficiently fine-scale resolution. In this study, we develop and evaluate an integrative approach to measuring and modeling fine-scale viewscape characteristics of a mixed-use urban environment, a city park. Our viewscape approach improves the integration of geospatial and perception elicitation techniques by combining high-resolution lidar-based digital surface models, visual obstruction, and photorealistic immersive virtual environments (IVEs). We assessed the realism of our viewscape models by comparing metrics of viewscape composition and configuration to human subject evaluations of IVEs across multiple landscape settings. We found strongly significant correlations between viewscape metrics and participants’ perceptions of viewscape openness and naturalness, and moderately strong correlations with landscape complexity. These results suggest that lidar-enhanced viewscape models can adequately represent visual characteristics of fine-scale urban environments. Findings also indicate the existence of relationships between human perception and landscape pattern. Our approach allows urban planners and designers to model and virtually evaluate high-resolution viewscapes of urban parks and natural landscapes with fine-scale details never before demonstrated.

中文翻译：

---

通过沉浸式虚拟环境评估的高分辨率Viewscape建模

城市环境的视觉特征会影响人类的感知和行为，包括对生活，娱乐和交通方式的选择。尽管地理空间可视化具有很大的潜力，可以更好地为城市规划和设计提供信息，但是仍缺乏以足够精细的分辨率实际测量和建模城市和公园景观的计算方法。在这项研究中，我们开发和评估一种综合方法，用于测量和建模混合使用的城市环境，城市公园的精细尺度景观特征。我们的景观方法通过结合基于高分辨率激光雷达的数字表面模型，视觉障碍和逼真的沉浸式虚拟环境（IVE），改善了地理空间和感知启发技术的集成。我们通过比较景观构成和配置的度量与跨多个景观设置的IVE的人类对象评估来评估我们的景观模型的真实性。我们发现景观度量标准与参与者对景观开放性和自然性的感知之间存在极显着的相关性，并且与景观复杂性具有中等程度的相关性。这些结果表明，激光雷达增强的景观模型可以充分代表精细规模城市环境的视觉特征。研究结果还表明，人类感知与景观格局之间存在联系。我们的方法使城市规划人员和设计师可以建模和虚拟评估城市公园和自然景观的高分辨率景观，并具有从未展示过的精细比例的细节。