New methodologies for the noise annoyance assessment of urban projects

This paper presents the work of SONORUS-ESR6 project: New methodologies for the noise annoyance assessment of urban projects. The project aims to develop new ecological assessment of sound environment that takes into account the multisensory and interdependent nature of human perception through the application of immersive virtual reality (IVR), and that involves both samples of the population and the public administration during the design process of urban projects. The first part of the work, based on new case studies and existing literature, argued and developed theories to support the use of IVR for environmental evaluation. Particularly, correlations between several sense stimuli (audio, visual, olfactory) were investigated, and the validity of IVR as a surrogate of real environment for evaluations was examined. Secondly, hardware and software used to prepare and set up a demonstrator IVR tool were tested. The tool comes in two versions: online and offline. Both versions allow real-time rendering of 3D audio-visual content. Finally, the IVR tool was applied with simulated scenarios, based on proposed actions on case sites, to demonstrate and test its use for noise evaluation of urban projects. The potentialities of the tool and the advantage and disadvantage of the two versions were discussed.