Influence of offset and initial position of storefronts on the perception of the street center axis

There are many middle areas in cities, such as open terraces and pilotis, at the boundary between public and private spaces. Urban street space is full of diversity and flexibility as a middle area between the public and private, with space created as by-products that protrude into the street and storefronts that are open to the street. Watanabe focused on the composition and content of the middle area in the storefronts of shopping streets and classified the middle area into two types: the “intrusion” and “extrusion.” This study focused on the offset of street-facing storefronts in the middle area. This study aimed to analyze the subject’s sensory street center position and gain insights into street planning in the shopping district. The subjects wore a head-mounted display (HMD) and experimented with immersive virtual reality (VR). Ten healthy college students in their twenties participated in the experiment. The width of the street was set to 6m, and buildings were created to flank the street. In the building on one side, a middle area was set to face the street. Four middle areas were created by multiplying two offset values (1m and 2m) and two unevenness directions (concave and convex), respectively. One of the four types of middle areas was arranged on one side of the buildings in each condition.The street was flowing so that the subjects felt it at a speed of 0.5 m/sec. Furthermore, to consider the differences in the criteria for determining the central axis among the subjects, a street space without a middle area was also created as the base space. While the street space flowed from front to back, the subject started from the edge of the building on one side and walked to the center of the buildings with his legs. The coordinates in the width direction of the position where the subject finally stopped, feeling that he had reached the center, were extracted and recorded as the coordinates of the sensory center. The following two findings were obtained from the analysis of the experimental results. When the middle area was retracted, the subject’s sensory center position depended on the side of the middle area. In addition, we found that the subject’s sensory center position depended on the side of the middle area. In the future, using the width of the middle area as a variable, we will experiment with the relationship between the base and concave conditions, which produced significance in this experiment, and discover proof that subjects indicate the public/private boundary of the middle area.