Assessment of path choices on a country walk using a virtual environment

Virtual environments can provide landscape researchers new opportunities to explore aspects of landscape perception and response. A virtual environment requires a detailed 3D model of a place and the use of a high performance computer to allow people to explore it interactively. As with any new experimental tool, we should first establish the validity of the technique. This paper describes the process of model building for a section of the Dee valley in northeast Scotland, the development of software to support interactive exploration, and an experiment which was designed to answer some primary questions about validity and some secondary ones about local landscape preferences. The findings were encouraging for the further use of virtual environments and showed that people made choices in the virtual environment which fitted their stated preferences and were different from the choices other subjects made on the basis of still images.