Effect of Colorfulness of Texture arranged on Sidewall of Pathway on Walking Speed

Abstract: Controlling human walking speed is an important topic in architectural planning. Understanding the factors that cause changes in walking speed can contribute to the crowd manipulation and the improvement of street attractiveness. Visual information is one of the most important factors for changing the walking speed, and a lot of study has been conducted on it. However, few studies have examined the relationship between walking speed and visual stimuli by color.Therefore, this study conducted an experiment using virtual environment technology to evaluate the effect of the colorfulness of the texture on the sidewall of the pathway on walking speed. The main purpose of this study is to obtain useful knowledge for the design of attractive street through quantitative analysis of the experimental results.Ten university students as the participants were asked to wear a wide view head-mounted display (Star VR one/ Star VR Co. /Horizontal angle of Field of View: 210°) in the experiment. Since the size of the real experimental room was large enough (9,680 mm x 15,600 mm) and the HMD’s position has been fully captured with in the area, the participants could walk around in a virtual environment with their own feet. The participants were asked to walk 6 m along through each of pathways in eight different conditions presented within this virtual environment, and their walking speed was measured.　In common setting with each condition, the width of pathway was set at 6m wide and height of sidewalls were also set at 6m on both sides. The entire length of pathway were set at 200 m, so that the end of the pathway was not visible for the participants in walking.The texture of the sidewalls of the pathway consisted of small square tiles joined together. Two levels of the size of the tiles (500mm square or 1000mm square) and two levels of the colorfulness of the tiles (Colored or Non-Colored) were combined to form the different experimental conditions. For each of these four conditions, adding a case in which the participant was asked to gaze at any location and a case in which he was instructed to gaze the point floated 30 m ahead in the travel direction to continue, we made a total of eight conditions. The participants examined these eight conditions in random order.The results of the experiment showed that the average walking speed were significantly higher in the Colored condition than in the Non-colored condition, especially in the case of participants gazing point was not fixed on travel direction. And these significant differences were also found regardless of the tile size level. This result indicates that walking speed was accelerated when walking in the richly "colorfulness" environment than when walking in the less "colorfulness" environment.In addition, in the case of the participant's gaze position was fixed, this significant difference in colorfulness could not be confirmed. This may be due to the ability of peripheral visual field. The peripheral visual field has lower ability to discriminate colors than the central visual field. While the gaze position was fixed to travel direction, the sidewalls were perceived mainly in this peripheral visual field. Therefore, it is considered that the effect of the colorfulness was difficult to appear.

Keywords: Virtual Environment, Spatial Perception, Architectural Design

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003425

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