Excessive motorisation, resulting from the vicious cycle of car-oriented road development and car-reliant land development, significantly deteriorates walking environments, causing traffic safety problems, damaging city-centre vitality, and hindering sustainable mobility. Many Asian cities face these issues, and as a result, it is often difficult for their street users to experience higher level walking needs, such as comfort and attractiveness, in their daily walking environments. Without such experiences, street users may have difficulty in finding high quality street environments. Visualisation technologies allowing street users to virtually experience more diverse walking needs may assist them in recognising new visions of walkable cities. Accordingly, this study conducts an experimental analysis of walkability evaluations by applying virtual reality tools for evaluating various streets to answer the following research questions: (1) How are street environments related to walking perceptions and behaviours? (2) Is virtual reality visualisation advantageous for revealing these relationships? The research conducted an experiment on virtual reality walkability evaluation that examined perception-based evaluations of street environments in car-reliant large cities of Japan, Thailand, and Australia. The evaluation mechanism of walkability was analysed based on walking needs, taking into account the impact of the virtual reality tools. The results demonstrate that virtual reality evaluation of internationally diverse street environments reflects the sensitivity of walking willingness to the satisfaction of hierarchical walking needs. Further, the impact of virtual reality use was observed in the greater engagement with virtual environments, which is related to higher walking willingness. The results have major implications for planning and design practices, suggesting the potential of virtual reality-based evaluation systems as useful tools for creating and implementing new visions of walkable cities.

机动车道路发展和依赖汽车的土地开发的恶性循环导致过度机动化，极大地恶化了步行环境，导致交通安全问题，破坏了城市中心的活力，并阻碍了可持续交通发展。许多亚洲城市都面临这些问题，因此，他们的街道使用者在日常的步行环境中常常很难体验到更高层次的步行需求，例如舒适性和吸引力。没有这种经验，街道用户可能很难找到高质量的街道环境。允许街道用户虚拟地体验更多步行需求的可视化技术可以帮助他们认识步行城市的新视野。因此，这项研究通过应用虚拟现实工具评估各种街道来回答以下研究问题，从而对步行能力进行了实验分析：（1）街道环境与步行的感知和行为有何关系？（2）虚拟现实可视化是否有利于揭示这些关系？这项研究进行了一项关于虚拟现实步行能力评估的实验，该实验审查了日本，泰国和澳大利亚汽车依赖大城市的街道环境基于感知的评估。考虑到虚拟现实工具的影响，根据步行需求分析了步行能力评估机制。结果表明，对国际多样化街道环境的虚拟现实评估反映了步行意愿对满足分层步行需求的敏感性。此外，在与虚拟环境的更多互动中观察到了虚拟现实使用的影响，这与更高的行走意愿有关。结果对规划和设计实践具有重大意义，表明基于虚拟现实的评估系统作为创建和实施步行城市新愿景的有用工具的潜力。