Chengyu Sun

A better understanding of the associations between urban morphology and performance can support more evidence-based urban governance and design evaluation. However, conventional hand-crafted metrics may omit important configurational information, making it difficult to model morphology–performance relationships consistently across multiple performance domains and under changing urban conditions. To address this issue, this study tests a modeling pathway based on variational autoencoder (VAE) latent representations of urban morphology, combined with neighborhood de-averaging to reduce the influence of locational context, and evaluates it through a four-phase design covering explanatory gain, cross-dimensional response, contextual-scale and spatial robustness, and temporal generalizability. Using Shanghai as the empirical case, the results show that the latent-representation modeling pathway consistently outperforms multiple hand-crafted metric-based baselines. This relative advantage remained evident across multiple contextual scales, under spatially grouped validation, and in temporal validation. The pathway enables complex urban morphology to enter multidimensional performance models through a unified representation and has practical application potential for data-driven urban evaluation and performance-oriented planning support.

Two-dimensional spatial analysis and trajectory-based environmental behavior research are widely used methods for investigating pedestrian wayfinding behavior. However, they often struggle to balance efficiency and granularity. This study draws inspiration from serious games to develop an online VR-based wayfinding platform for behavioral research, aiming to enhance data collection and improve resolution. A virtual replica of Satellite Terminal 1 (S1) of Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG) was created, providing participants with an immersive and intuitive environment. Accessible via any compatible web browser, the platform utilizes a browser/server (B/S) framework, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of behavioral data acquisition. Wayfinding tasks were designed with competitive mechanisms and reward-based elements to encourage public participation and exploration. Within three days of the platform's launch, 370 participants completed wayfinding tasks, generating a rich dataset of 2,746 trajectories and observed behaviors with spatial accuracy at the decimeter level and temporal accuracy at the second level. This study demonstrates that a gamified VR-based platform is a viable approach for researching navigation behavior, offering notable advantages in cost-effectiveness, participant engagement, and data acquisition efficiency.

The concept of the metaverse, representing a cutting-edge virtual reality paradigm, has gained significant traction as a mode of communication and data acquisition within virtual environments, applied across diverse domains. This study investigates the utilization of a metaverse-based platform in environmental behavior analysis, focusing on wayfinding behavior. We developed a metaverse-based platform for the Satellite Terminal 1 (S1) of Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG), offering participants an immersive and intuitive virtual environment. Leveraging the serious game concept, we designed a wayfinding task, through which 2,746 wayfinding trajectory data were collected for performance evaluation purposes. Notably, this metaverse-based platform presents a feasible and efficient approach for studying wayfinding behavior and streamlining data collection processes.

Virtual reality technologies facilitate the presentation of the indoor and outdoor environment, enabling researchers to conduct environmental behaviour experiments and evidence-based design research with great feasibility. However, most previous environmental behaviour research based on VR technologies did not consider the surrounding crowd, especially wayfinding-related research. Thus, from a human-centric perspective, the credibility of these studies will be greatly argued. Are the avatars indispensable in the virtual environment? To answer this question, we designed a comparative test including three scenarios: the virtual environment without avatars, data-driven avatars in the virtual environment, and agent-based avatars in the virtual environment. Taking the Satellite Terminal of Shanghai Pudong International Airport as a study case, we developed an online VR wayfinding experiment platform. 435 participants were invited to this experiment, their wayfinding performance will be recorded and then analysed and visualisation. The results demonstrate that the presence or absence of avatars significantly impacts the participants' decision-making time in virtual environments. Besides, the distribution and movement of avatars may affect the participants' wayfinding behaviour. This study highlights the importance of avatars in VR-based experiments and validates the feasibility of data-driven avatars replicating real-world crowds.