The Europe2020 document indicates a new strategy to turn EU into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. At local level urban planning policies may help to reach these aims. Several research works proposed the Immersive Virtual Reality as tool to evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions. Nevertheless people's perception within virtual environments still needs to be verified. In this study, two groups of participants had to provide subjective measures related to the global, acoustic and visual quality of a real environment or of a multisensory reproduced version in Immersive Virtual Reality. Outcomes highlight the ecological effectiveness of this multisensory tool

The development of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) allows advanced interactive participation of citizens in the decision making processes. These participatory processes can be conducted through an innovative technology such as the Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR), as long as this technology is accessible and affordable for citizens. This paper explains the development of an online interactive tool that combines the use of IVR with maps. The tool can be used for the evaluation and monitoring of the spatial changes in the environmental noise appraisals of different areas of the city for future design processes, and will allow to involve a higher number of participants in comparison with laboratory experiments. It is aimed at becoming a collective participatory tool that uses spatial audio and virtual scenarios for a smart soundscape study, with the unique condition that the users have a smartphone and an IVR phone based headset, or the head mounted display Oculus Rift. A preliminary implementation of this tool has been tested in the Naples, using 360°-video based Immersive Reality and in situ sound registrations with the Ambisonic technique. The outcomes on the citizens' participation are shown through coloured maps. Laboratory test in the anechoic chamber and on-site interviews have been conducted to compare the results with the ones of the home test and evaluate the validity of the tool. The data analysis show no statistically significant differences between the outcomes of the three modalities of multisensorial experience evaluated for the variables under study.

High flows of road traffic noise in urban agglomerations can negatively affect the livability of squares and parks located at the neighborhood, district and city levels, therefore pushing anyone who wants to enjoy calmer, quieter areas to move to non-urban parks. Due to the distances between these areas, it is not possible to go as regularly as would be necessary to satisfy any needs. Even if cities are densely populated, the presence of a sea or riverfront offers the possibility of large restorative places, or at least with potential features for being the natural core of an urban nucleus after a renewal intervention. This study evaluates the soundscape of the Naples waterfront, presenting an overview of the most significant visual, acoustic and spatial factors related to the pedestrian areas, as well as areas open to road traffic and others where the road traffic is limited. The factors were chosen with feature selection methods and artificial neural networks. The results show how certain factors, such as the perimeter between the water and promenade, the visibility of the sea or the density of green areas, can affect the perception of the soundscape quality in the areas with road traffic. In the pedestrian areas, acoustic factors, such as loudness or the A-weighted sound level exceeded for 10% of the measurement duration (LA10), influence the perceived quality of the soundscape.

Noise mapping is a useful and widespread method to visualise various items like the exposure to noise pollution, statistics of affected population, different noise source contribution analysis, and it is also a useful tool in designing noise-control plans. Some researches have moved a step further, proposing maps to represent the people perception of the acoustic environment. Most of these maps use colours as mere tools to display the spatial variability of acoustic parameters. In this paper the colours associated by interviewed people to different urban soundscapes have been analysed, and the possibility of using meaningful colours to represent the soundscape quality in noise mapping has been examined. For this purpose, correspondence analysiswas applied on the data collected fromon-site interviews, performed in the water front of Naples and its surroundings. The outcomes show that in the pedestrian areas nearby the sea, the blue colour was often associated with the soundscape rating, whereas in the areas nearby the sea but open to road traffic the interviewees selected mainly the blue and grey colours. In the areas away from the sea, a wider selection of colours was observed: red and greywere predominantly selected in the areas open to road traffic and green, yellow and red in the green areas.