Impact of Public Lighting Intensity on the Feeling of Safety in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Over the past decades the urban night landscapes have been associated with over-lighting, which has become the norm. Arguably, lighting systems play a major role in the city life (feeling of safety, development of a night time economy and various night practices). But the urge for reducing energy consumption and protecting biodiversity must be considered while designing public lighting, without compromising the feeling of safety. In this paper, researchers from Urban Planning, Psychology and Computer Science were gathered by the transdisciplinary research program "Noz Breizh". They are proposing an exploratory approach to use Virtual Reality to test different lighting intensities for studying its impact on the feeling of safety of pedestrians. As a first result we observed a logarithmic relation between the feeling of safety and the light intensity.