Virtual Reality in Urban Health Research: Experimental Research on Urban Walking Determinants in Luxembourg

Understanding how combinations of static and dynamic attributes in everyday environments, including built, natural, and social environments, influence walking experiences is crucial for promoting active mobility and its associated physical and mental health benefits in cities. Addressing this complexity requires experimental research that employs emerging technologies to systematically assess these relationships. To achieve this, this dissertation leverages motion-based immersive virtual reality (VR), combined with a wearable health-monitoring wristband, as an innovative research tool to advance theoretical and methodological understanding of how everyday environments influence walking behavior and affective responses to these environments. VR offers new opportunities to study active behaviors by enhancing engagement and enabling researchers to systematically examine experiential and affective dimensions of walking in a controlled environment. The research follows a three-stage design, with each stage building on the insights gained from the former stages.
The first stage presents a systematic literature review of 18 empirical studies selected from 3,255 records. The objective was to identify which environmental attributes have been investigated in relation to walking and cycling using motion-based VR, and to understand their influence on active mobility behavior. The review indicated that only a limited range of environmental attributes has been explored, with greenness, pathway design, crowd density, and traffic emerging as the most frequently studied. Most studies focused on these attributes in isolation, with only a handful considering a combination of various static and dynamic attributes within a single scenario. These studies have also rarely integrated subjective and objective measurements of active mobility behaviors. Additionally, previous studies mainly relied on small, homogeneous samples, which restricted the generalizability of the findings. Acknowledging these gaps, the review highlighted VR's potential for disentangling the effects of complex environments on active mobility behaviors while ensuring high internal and ecological validity. The findings underscore the need for additional research to assess diverse environmental attributes using the 5D framework (density, diversity, design, destination accessibility, and distance to transit) and to explore the interplay of a combination of static and dynamic attributes within a single scenario, to better reflect the complexities of the real-world environments. These findings lay the foundation for the next two empirical stages in the thesis.
In the second stage, a pilot experiment examined the representativeness of motion-based immersive VR in replicating psychological and physiological affective responses comparable to real environments (RE) while walking. The pilot was an essential step to test the reliability of the experimental setup and protocol, and the suitability of the measurements before the main experiment. Forty-nine participants walked through two contrasting street segments in both real and virtual environments (VE) in a randomized order. While RE elicited significantly higher positive affective responses than VE, similar patterns were observed across both environments. In both RE and VE, the walking-friendly segment consistently generated higher positive affective responses than the car-friendly segment. These findings validated motion-based immersive VR as a feasible and reliable tool for studying environmental effects on walking experiences and provided a methodological foundation for the main experiment.
Building upon these insights, the final stage employed a mixed-methods conjoint VR experiment to address several gaps identified in the systematic review, using the validated experimental setup from the pilot experiment. This stage explored how combinations of eight static and dynamic environmental attributes influence affective responses and walking preferences, as well as how socio-demographic characteristics and transport habits affect these responses. The investigated attributes included greenness, building height, sidewalk width and connectivity, street functions, sidewalk use, car traffic intensity, and pedestrian density. Twelve Luxembourg-inspired scenarios were created using an orthogonal design and experienced by 239 Luxembourg residents or cross-border commuters. Findings revealed that wide, connected sidewalks are necessary but not sufficient for ensuring a comfortable and enjoyable walking experience. Instead, combinations of attributes should be considered. Attributes such as mixed land-use, outdoor activity, and low pedestrian density enhanced walking enjoyment, while low car traffic and pedestrian density contributed to perceived comfort. Greenness was perceived as a baseline expectation for walking-friendly environments in Luxembourg, yet its provision in urban environments depends on other environmental attributes, such as sidewalk width. Latent class analysis identified distinct walking orientation groups, though socio-demographic differences between these groups were minimal, underscoring the broad applicability of the findings.
Taken together, these studies addressed the overarching aim of this dissertation and demonstrated that motion-based immersive VR can provide an ecologically rich yet experimentally controlled environment to investigate human–environment interactions, and disentangle the influence of a combination of specific environmental attributes on individuals’ affective responses and walking preferences. The insights of this dissertation shed light on a robust methodological framework and novel empirical findings for research in urban planning and design, public health, transport behavior, VR, and human-computer interaction. It validates VR as a valuable tool for walking behavior research and provides evidence on environmental determinants of walking. The findings also offer practical implications for designing healthy urban spaces that encourage active mobility in cities, thereby supporting both physical and mental health.