Outdoor urban lighting design is a complex issue. It involves multiple aspects (energy consumption, lighting pollution, aesthetics, and safety) that must be balanced to make sustainable decisions. Although the energy and environmental issues assumed a driving role in the optimization of the urban lighting design, its impact on the psychophysical well-being of individuals has received less attention. Artificial lighting has been shown to add several meanings to an individual’s experience of space: affective (affect, emotion, mood), cognitive (attention, imagination, perception), associative (memory, judgment), and motivational (closeness, openness, communication). Traditionally, studies on the effects of lighting on individuals’ emotions have mainly focused on indoor spaces, while the present study aims to investigate the influence of lighting on individuals’ emotions in an outdoor environment. Participants experienced a simulated urban park through virtual reality. Specifically, the urban park was shown with different combinations of overall illuminance (high vs medium vs low) and correlated colour temperature (CCT) (warm vs intermediate vs cool). For each combination, participants were asked to judge how they felt. In general, results showed that high-intensity cool light made participants more nervous, while warm light made individuals feel more tired and less motivated to explore the park. In contrast, an intermediate CCT at low or medium illuminance impacted individuals positively. Finally, it was found that participants’ mood predicted the impact that park lighting would have on them. These results suggest that assessing the influence of lighting on individuals’ emotions allows the decision-makers to implement the type of artificial lighting that will simultaneously safeguard both the well-being of individuals and the environment.

Green areas and parks are increasingly important in improving citizens’ physical and mental recovery. Lighting systems play a considerable role in affecting city park life and activities along with people’s moods and behavior in the evening and at night. Immersive virtual reality laboratory experiments may support urban and lighting research by providing information on the combination of lighting setup and visual context of existing or new urban parks. Gaze behaviors obtained from eye-tracking recordings and self-reported measurements using the perceived outdoor lighting quality questionnaire were used to determine the factors affecting human perception, comfort, and cognitive load, as the overall illuminance levels of the scene and correlated color temperature changes. Results pointed out that overall illuminance level and CCT significantly affect the perceived strength and comfort qualities of lighting with a dominance of the first compared with the latter when subjects were free to explore the lit environment. Low CCT and intermediate or high overall illuminance levels can improve the sense of accessibility as well as minimize the cognitive load.

Road traffic noise control in urban green space is a big concern for urban designers and public managers. The introduction of water sounds into noisy environment has been proven effective based on the soundscape approach. To extend more effective and applicable strategies for water sound informational masking, the exploration of the spatial settings of virtual water sound playbacks in urban parks were conducted both in the laboratory and field settings. Three different spatial water-sound sequences were added into the virtual noisy environment through an immersive spatial audio system and the real urban green park through the digital audio programming of bluetooth loudspeakers. The mental activities and subjective feelings of two group subjects were evaluated by a portable electroencephalogram (EEG) measurement with a post-doc questionnaire. The better masking effects introduced by the spatial settings of water sounds had been confirmed from the results of more positive emotional feedbacks and more relaxed mental state revealed by the spectral power of alpha band across two experimental conditions. Especially, the two-position switching water sounds brought more attentional network activations. Moreover, more sensory accumulation effects reflected by the mental network activations were observed from the brain activities in the in situ measurement compared to laboratory-setting.