Feeling blue? Blue urban park accent lighting will remedy that! An online study leveraging VR and facial expression analysis technology

Keywords: urban parks, color, emotion, VR, empirical study
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Urban parks are less frequented during nighttime because especially women often feel unsafe as soon as it gets dark outside. There have been attempts to mitigate this by exploring new ways of accent lighting of public spaces after sunset. It is still unclear whether colourful illumination of an urban recreational area at night has a desired positive emotional effect on park visitors. We thus set out to assess how blue lighting, universally known to elicit calmness and contentment compared to standard white lighting, might influence emotional well-being of citizens in urban parks at night. Participants’ emotional responses were captured at four different time points while watching an online video of a stroll in a virtual urban park at night in which the path of the stroll was lit either in blue or in white (between-subject design). We leveraged the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW) instrument together with novel and real-time online facial expression recognition technology, thus by combining self-reports and psychophysiological measures, to capture participants' emotions. Preliminary results of the self-reports indicate that blue lighting has an effect, but it does not persist until after the park stroll. We did not find a significant effect in the psychophysiological data on facial expressions across the two experimental conditions. However, participants’ affect judgments differ across gender. Our results thus highlight the importance of lighting colour in urban parks at night that consider individual and group differences, and also critically assesses how human emotions can be captured with novel online sensory data collection methodologies.