Fascinating Streets: The Impact of Building Facades and Green View

Urban streets, as the center of urban spaces, are important urban assets for city wandering experience. This paper explored two variables, building facades and green view, and their impacts on the fascination degree of the streets via virtual reality experiment. Ninety college students participated in this study using Virtual Reality (VR) headsets to experience the street environments, followed by a questionnaire concerning their environmental experience. Results revealed that the fascination degree of the streets were influenced by both the type of building facades and the degree of green view, while the former showed a higher impact than the later. The impact on the degree of fascination is in descending order from the streets with gray spaces in front of buildings, to open streets with no divisions in front of buildings, to the degree of green view, then to the streets with glass faces in front of buildings, still then to the streets with fences, and finally to the streets with walls. The perception of fascination indicate the possibility of the participation of body movements beyond the visual explorations.