Assessing the Future Streetscape of Rimini Harbor Docks with Virtual Reality

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper deals with a very important problem for large civil engineering constructions, namely their social acceptance by public opinion.

The paper is, therefore, very current, in line with the title and aim of the journal, well presented and easy to read.

However, the following findings may be useful to improve the quality of the article:

1.                   The authors report details regarding the ordinary steps necessary to run commercial software that should be avoided, as they are of no scientific interest.

2.                   It seems that people have to decide only based on the visual impact that the new project has on the people, compared to the real situation. However, nowadays, even non-experts persons want to analyze rational information and data on which to base their decisions.

3.                   The Authors, in the Conclusions, should emphasize the innovation of this research, given that this type of "dissemination" to the public, made through virtual reality tools has existed for some time. Then, they should clarify whether this representation is qualitatively better than the existing ones (supporting this statement with data), if the type of representation provides data that can be used in subsequent analysis, if the result of the interviews is used in some way.

Author Response

Dear Editor and reviewers,

The authors would like to thank you very much for your valuable remarks and corrections, which we hope will participate in improving the paper quality and possible impact. Please find below the reviewer’s comments and our answers. Following the editor guidelines, the modifications of the manuscript were added in the latex file with track changes on, and are part of our response to the reviewers.

Following comments by the reviewers, we substantially enhanced the following section:

section 3 Experimental Results

We indeed added an analysis divided into the several aspects of urban place design that are addressed in this study. The conclusions was modified to highlight the contribution of this work.

Looking forward to your favorable considerations.

Best regards,

Dr Rachid Belaroussi, Corinne Dionisio, Dr Sonia Adelé, University Gustave Eiffel

Margherita Pazzini, Israa Issa, Dr Claudio Lantieri, Dr Valeria Vignali, University of Bologna

Elena Diaz, University of La Laguna

REVIEWER 1

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper deals with a very important problem for large civil engineering constructions, namely their social acceptance by public opinion.

The paper is, therefore, very current, in line with the title and aim of the journal, well presented and easy to read.

However, the following findings may be useful to improve the quality of the article:

1. The authors report details regarding the ordinary steps necessary to run commercial software that should be avoided, as they are of no scientific interest.
2. It seems that people have to decide only based on the visual impact that the new project has on the people, compared to the real situation. However, nowadays, even non-experts persons want to analyze rational information and data on which to base their decisions.
3. The Authors, in the Conclusions, should emphasize the innovation of this research, given that this type of "dissemination" to the public, made through virtual reality tools has existed for some time. Then, they should clarify whether this representation is qualitatively better than the existing ones (supporting this statement with data), if the type of representation provides data that can be used in subsequent analysis, if the result of the interviews is used in some way.

Answers

1. The authors report details regarding the ordinary steps necessary to run commercial software that should be avoided, as they are of no scientific interest.

We believe that the construction of the virtual scenes and the tools used to do it is of interest in this study for two reasons. First, it is valuable information for practitioners who would like to reproduce these experiments in another urban context. Second, the quality of the data used depends on the experiment design workflow. Indeed, the fact that we used GIS based data has an impact on the aesthetic quality of the virtual scenes: the use of BIM based or more precise architectural data would have produced scenes of different visual quality, leading to other responses from the participants.

2. It seems that people have to decide only based on the visual impact that the new project has on the people, compared to the real situation. However, nowadays, even non-experts persons want to analyze rational information and data on which to base their decisions.

Thank you very much for this specific remark. The overall objective of the project is to provide a methodology for visual comparison between two scenes of an infrastructure before/after modifications. This study is a complement of two other studies of the same area that were based on other types of data and analyses such as BOCR and SWOT analysis. Prior to this work, evaluation methods were developed in the decision-making process, considering different social, economic, and environmental aspects in order to obtain a priority scale of interventions for urban regeneration. We underlined these aspects in the abstract and in section 2. Analysis of Rimini area as it was indeed missing.

3. The Authors, in the Conclusions, should emphasize the innovation of this research, given that this type of "dissemination" to the public, made through virtual reality tools has existed for some time. Then, they should clarify whether this representation is qualitatively better than the existing ones (supporting this statement with data), if the type of representation provides data that can be used in subsequent analysis, if the result of the interviews is used in some way.

The conclusions were modified to take into account these suggestions. Also the section 3 Experimental Results has been profusely modified to answer this question and better explain the contribution of this work.

We hope to have answered all your questions, corrections and suggestions, clearly enough and we are much obliged for your review.

Best regards,

the authors.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors considered human factors as one of the factors in the successful design of infrastructure. They used non-immersive VR to assess how stakeholders see the difference and similarities between existing infrastructure conditions and design alternatives. They used survey questionnaires to collect respondents' responses to various questions on before and after infrastructure conditions. Their empirical results showed that stakeholders' participation in infrastructure design at the design stage is vital to improving the infrastructure design by incorporating the users' experience.

This research aims to assess non-immersive virtual reality (VR) as a tool in project evaluation by stakeholders during the pre-implementation stage of the projects.

The methodology used in evaluating the usefulness of non-immersive VR is appropriate. However, visualization 1 and 2 comparisons presented in video 1 seem to have different resolutions; hence, the resolution difference may impact the responders' perception of the two visualizations.  So, it would have been better if the same resolutions had been used.

The organization of the paper is easy to follow. The paper has been written very well and hence is easy to understand.

Line 222: The statement "first virtual reality ..." should be corrected as "First, virtual reality ...."

Line 253: The statement "for this purpose, ..." should be corrected as "For this purpose, ..."

Line 260: The figure number is missing. 

The sizes of Figures 5, 6, and 7 are small. The graphs and texts should be enlarged for better visualization and readability.

The survey questions provided in Appendix A should be of a higher font size. Also, they should be typed for better visibility instead of copying and pasting an image file.

Author Response

Dear Editor and reviewers,

The authors would like to thank you very much for your valuable remarks and corrections, which we hope will participate in improving the paper quality and possible impact. Please find below the reviewer’s comments and our answers. Following the editor guidelines, the modifications of the manuscript were added in the latex file with track changes on, and are part of our response to the reviewers.

Following comments by the reviewers, we substantially enhanced the following section:

section 3 Experimental Results

We indeed added an analysis divided into the several aspects of urban place design that are addressed in this study. The conclusions was modified to highlight the contribution of this work.

Looking forward to your favorable considerations.

Best regards,

Dr Rachid Belaroussi, Corinne Dionisio, Dr Sonia Adelé, University Gustave Eiffel

Margherita Pazzini, Israa Issa, Dr Claudio Lantieri, Dr Valeria Vignali, University of Bologna

Elena Diaz, University of La Laguna

Reviewer 2

The authors considered human factors as one of the factors in the successful design of infrastructure. They used non-immersive VR to assess how stakeholders see the difference and similarities between existing infrastructure conditions and design alternatives. They used survey questionnaires to collect respondents' responses to various questions on before and after infrastructure conditions. Their empirical results showed that stakeholders' participation in infrastructure design at the design stage is vital to improving the infrastructure design by incorporating the users' experience.

This research aims to assess non-immersive virtual reality (VR) as a tool in project evaluation by stakeholders during the pre-implementation stage of the projects.

The methodology used in evaluating the usefulness of non-immersive VR is appropriate. However, visualization 1 and 2 comparisons presented in video 1 seem to have different resolutions; hence, the resolution difference may impact the responders' perception of the two visualizations.  So, it would have been better if the same resolutions had been used.

The organization of the paper is easy to follow. The paper has been written very well and hence is easy to understand.

Line 222: The statement "first virtual reality ..." should be corrected as "First, virtual reality ...."

Line 253: The statement "for this purpose, ..." should be corrected as "For this purpose, ..."

Line 260: The figure number is missing.

The sizes of Figures 5, 6, and 7 are small. The graphs and texts should be enlarged for better visualization and readability.

The survey questions provided in Appendix A should be of a higher font size. Also, they should be typed for better visibility instead of copying and pasting an image file.

Answers

The methodology used in evaluating the usefulness of non-immersive VR is appropriate. However, visualization 1 and 2 comparisons presented in video 1 seem to have different resolutions; hence, the resolution difference may impact the responders' perception of the two visualizations.  So, it would have been better if the same resolutions had been used.

Thank you very much for this specific remark. The overall objective of the project is to provide a methodology for visual comparison between two scenes of an infrastructure before/after modifications. The resolution difference between the Google Earth Studio video and the TwinMotion video has indeed an impact on the responders’ perception of the scene but it was impossible to reproduce since they are two different softwares. We added a remark underlining this fact in section Experimental result for the Part 1 on the experiment. However since we were mostly interested in functional aspects of the virtual representation, we believe that a similar resolution would have been a nice-to-have but not imperative element of the study.

The organization of the paper is easy to follow. The paper has been written very well and hence is easy to understand.

Thank you for this kind remark: we have corrected the elements that you have pointed to our attention.

The sizes of Figures 5, 6, and 7 are small. The graphs and texts should be enlarged for better visualization and readability.

Following your advice we modified these figures. In particular Figure 7 was divided into a more specific set of figures related to the various aspects of urban design addressed in this study.

The survey questions provided in Appendix A should be of a higher font size. Also, they should be typed for better visibility instead of copying and pasting an image file.

We provided the figure in the appendix in order for the readers to have a visual feel of the questionnaire and see exactly what it looked like. We believe these figures are more valuable as is, but in the new subsection that we added in section 3 Experimental results, the questions are clearly stated in the text and readable in the added new set of figures. The Part 2 and Part 3 questions are also listed in Table 2.

We hope to have answered all your questions, corrections and suggestions, clearly enough and we are much obliged for your review.

Best regards,

the authors.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf