A Study of the Physical Factors That Influence to Pedestrians Distance Perception

The purpose of this study is to find the physical factors that influence a pedestrian’s distance perception on urban streets. Many studies have been conducted to clarify that such environmental factors as number of intersections and landmarks (Sadala 1980), slopes (Okabe 1986) and destination visibility (Nasar 1985) influence distance perception, but the factors concerned with atmosphere of place had yet to be dealt with. Therefore, we attempted to clarify the influences of the amount of trees, shops and spaciousness of route while including some factors that had been revealed in the previous studies. In the first part of the study five routes to a university campus from a nearby commuter station were selected. The subject students were then asked to estimate the distance of segmented parts of the route with different atmosphere. The result shows four factors: 1)’walking time’; overestimation of the routes taking longer time caused by obstacles and a crowded environment 2)’energy load’; overestimation caused by upward slopes and stairs. 3)’information load’; overestimation in stairs. 4)’spaciousness’; underestimation in wide and extensive place. In the second part of the study an experiment was carried out to investigate the influence of ‘spaciousness’ of place by using a visual simulator. This simulator was developed to synchronize the subject's walking motion on the treadmill with video images shown on the head mounted display (HMD). The subjects were then asked to walk through a path that consisted of two spaces with differing width or height to show the proportion of the length of two spaces. The result revealed that a narrower, lower ceiling path where people perceive a much clearer line perspective and faster optical flow tends to be perceived longer.