The Nocturnity Scale: Measuring the Sense of Being at Night in Virtual Urban Environments

Abstract

Nighttime environments are increasingly used in virtual urban studies, yet darkness alone does not fully recreate the subjective sense of being at night. Prior work suggests that this experience depends not only on the absence of daylight, but also on lighting structure, low-light perception, human activity, soundscape, and self-related states. However, no existing tool directly assesses this scene-dependent subjective experience. This work introduces nocturnity as the feeling of being at night elicited by a scene and proposes a theory-driven framework structured into three subscales: perceptual, activity, and inner-state nocturnity. Based on this framework, we develop a first candidate questionnaire for virtual urban environments. Developed through a literature-informed process and reviewed by two urban lighting experts, the scale comprises 42 Likert-type items, including three diagnostic subscales and complementary global and time-related items. This work provides a first operational basis for comparing virtual urban scenes according to their perceived nocturnity and supports future empirical validation.