Audio-visual interactive evaluation of the forest landscape based on eye-tracking experiments

Abstract

The forest has become a retreat where people escape “urban diseases.” Unfortunately, there is a lack of audio-visual interaction research on the forest landscape. Through the field investigation of suburban national forest parks located in the Zhejiang and Fujian provinces of China, audio-visual materials were collected. Based on these data, eye-tracking experiments were conducted to investigate the audio-visual interactive evaluation of the forest landscape. Results revealed that bird twittering accompanied by insect chirping and water flowing or light music accompanied by ancient temple bells could enhance participants’ sense of involvement and immersion while significantly reducing the mental load. Peak landscape accompanied by bird twittering, insect chirping, flowing water, or light music and ancient temple bells were the most helpful at relieving tourists’ psychological pressure, while understory landscape accompanied by human sounds made tourists feel safer in the environment. For forest lawn and forest settlement, the flow of people and motor vehicle control should be strengthened to reduce clamor mixed with traffic sounds in order to create a quiet and relaxing leisurely experience for tourists. Additionally, the cognitive significance of eye tracker indicators is considerably different from visual aesthetic quality (VAQ) and tranquility rating (TR), which are evaluation indicators of different dimensions. In practical work, eye tracker indicators can be used as an effective substitute for VAQ and TR evaluation.