Virtual reality simulated aircraft flyovers: Influence of the landscape on the overall pleasantness of the environment.

To give residents better understanding of the impact of future airport scenarios, a virtual reality application with sound simulation will be tested in the frame of the European ANIMA project. The set-up has been evaluated in laboratory before being used in real situation. This paper presents the laboratory experiment whose aim is to assess the application's relevance for simulating flyovers. Although the perceptual experiment is designed to test the influence of aircraft vision crossed with aircraft sound, this paper focusses only on the impact of the landscape where the flyovers are observed. Two landscapes (park and buildings) are presented to 60 participants, in balanced order, with 12 audio-visual stimuli in both landscapes. Participants had to rate four differential semantic scales. Globally there is no influence of the landscape on the overall pleasantness, but when looking at the individual answers, it appears that three groups of participants can be discriminated. The majority of people do not change their pleasantness ratings in both landscapes, but some participants prefer experiencing the flyovers in the park landscape because it is visually more pleasant, and others prefer the opposite because it is more annoying to be submitted to aircraft noise in a green park landscape.