Nantes researchers' Nocturnity Scale quantifies night feel in VR cities

Nighttime virtual environments are increasingly used in urban studies, but darkness alone doesn't fully capture the subjective experience of being at night. A multidisciplinary team from Nantes University, IMT Atlantique, and AAU introduced the concept of "nocturnity" — the feeling of being at night elicited by a scene — and built a theory-driven framework with three subscales: perceptual (lighting structure, low-light perception), activity (human presence and actions), and inner-state (self-related feelings). This is the first tool to directly assess this scene-dependent experience.

To create the scale, the researchers conducted a literature-informed item generation process and had two urban lighting experts review the candidate items. The final questionnaire contains 42 Likert-type items, including the three diagnostic subscales plus complementary global and time-related questions. While the scale is presented as a first operational candidate, it already provides a practical basis for comparing virtual urban scenes according to their perceived nocturnity. The team plans empirical validation and hopes the tool will support future studies in urban lighting design, virtual reality simulations, and perception research. The paper was presented at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2026 in Rennes, France.