Research on Visual Comfort of Underground Commercial Streets’ Pavement in China on the Basis of Virtual Simulation

Abstract

As the physical environment of urban underground streets space is continuously perfect, people start to anticipate that underground streets with negative impression could satisfy their psychological comfort appeal as traditional ground streets do. Streets’ pavement is of great significance in creating humanized and comfortable underground spatial atmosphere, and different ground pavements of underground commercial streets display different visual comfort effects. We conducted field investigations of a dozen typical underground streets in eight big cities in China with 42 test samples, and this research obtained the pavement elements’ data of underground commercial streets, built virtual 3D scenes based on orthogonal analysis and virtual reality technology of computer vision, acquired the psychological data of spatial experience through virtual reality test, and analyzed the relationship between six elements (glossiness, roughness, color, dimension, pattern, and collage of ground pavement in underground commercial streets) and spatial visual comfort based on quantitative analysis of experimental data. Results show that, “Cold–hot sensation”, “Glossiness”, and “Collage ordered degree” are chief elements for underground commercial streets’ pavement design. The pavement design featured with neutral color, medium- and large-scale and ordered collage form are the design preference and emphasis for underground commercial streets. Neutral color of underground commercial streets pavement may have a great influence on the recognition of pavement glossiness.