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 environmen t 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 expe rimental tool, we should first establish the validity of the technique. Thi s paper describes the process of model building for a section of the Dee va lley in northeast Scotland, the development of software to support interact ive exploration, and an experiment which was designed to answer some primar y questions about validity and some secondary ones about local landscape pr eferences. The findings were encouraging for the further use of virtual env ironments and showed that people made choices in the virtual environment wh ich fitted their stated preferences and were different from the choices oth er subjects made on the basis of still images, (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.