Landscape and Urban Planning 157 (2017) 63–74 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Landscape and Urban Planning journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landurbplan Research paper Comparing text-only and virtual reality discrete choice experiments of neighbourhood choice Zachary Patterson a,* , Javad Mostofi Darbani a , Ali Rezaei a , John Zacharias b , Ali Yazdizadeh a a Transportation Research for Integrated Planning (TRIP) Laboratory, Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., H 1255-15 (Hall Building), Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada b College of Architecture and Landscape, Peking University, Beijing 200080, China h i g h l i g h t s • Virtual reality model had more significant coefficients. • Virtual reality platform appears to have better focused respondent attention. • Visually attributes did not gain importance relative to text-only attributes. • LPS visuals best employed when they are accurate descriptions of possible outcomes. • Visual LPSs well suited to use in public consultations on planning interventions. a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 12 June 2015 Received in revised form 13 May 2016 Accepted 25 May 2016 Keywords: Discrete choice experiments Landscape preference studies Neighborhood choice Attribute visualization Gaming engines a b s t r a c t Stated Preference (SP) surveys are used in many disciplines including: marketing; transportation-, environmental- and health-economics; and landscape and urban planning. The Landscape Preference Study (LPS) is a common SP technique in landscape and urban planning, defined by the presentation of landscapes through images, something uncontroversial in this literature. The use of visual attributes in SP surveys in the marketing and economics literatures has, however, aroused controversy. Poten- tial benefits are evoked (greater realism in tasks), but drawbacks (e.g. unintended information affecting respondent choices) are also discussed. At the same time, the use of visualization and simulation is said to be “outstripping” understanding of how best to use them in planning contexts. We adopt “the economic approach” to LPSs (the Discrete Choice Experiment) to better understand how presentational methods affect results in the context of neighborhood choice. We compare two experiments; one administered as a virtual reality simulation, and the other as a text-only survey. We conclude that in essence, respondent preferences in the text-only survey were based on respondent mental images of building types, whereas in the visual survey, preferences were based on the displayed images. As such, we propose that LPS visuals are best employed when the visual representations provided to respondents are accurate descriptions of possible outcomes, as they could be in public consultations related to landscape and urban planning. In so doing we make one step toward Lovett et al.’s (2015) call to help evaluate the increasing number of options available in landscape visualization. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The Stated Preference (SP) survey encompasses a large number of research tools designed to help understand people’s prefer- * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: zachary.patterson@concordia.ca, zak.patterson@gmail.com (Z. Patterson), jj.mostofi@gmail.com (J.M. Darbani), a.rezaaei@gmail.com (A. Rezaei), zachariasjohn478@gmail.com (J. Zacharias), ali.yazdizadeh.pres@gmail.com (A. Yazdizadeh). ences, and is used in many disciplines, including: marketing; transportation-, environmental- and health-economics; and land- scape and urban planning. One particularly common SP tool in landscape and urban planning is the Landscape Preference Study (LPS). LPSs take various forms, but a defining feature is the rep- resentation of landscapes as images, and increasingly, computer simulations. Images play a fundamental role in LPSs and their use in landscape and urban planning is uncontroversial. The visual presentation of attributes in SP surveys in the marketing and economics literatures, however, has aroused controversy. While http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.05.024 0169-2046/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.