With the continuous development of phenomenological theory, people gradually pay attention to the close connection between the spirit of place of the laminated waterfront and the digital cascade. In this paper, on the theoretical basis of phenomenology and VR-GIS technology, the GIS platform is utilized to carry out pre-processing, in the data samples read out through ArcINFO, so as to complete the data collection of this research. In order to avoid the influence of disturbing information on the research results, the interpolation method is used to process the disturbing information in the research data. Subsequently, with the help of corresponding software and hardware, the 3D model for place spirit and digital cascade is designed, and the model is simplified by visibility cropping, back polygon removal, and visibility removal, aiming to improve the performance of the model. Finally, River A is selected as an example for this study, and the model is used to carry out in-depth exploration and analysis. In terms of MAE, RMSE and R2, the VR-GIS simulation effect is much better than the 3dmax simulation effect, and the values of MAE, RMSE and R2 are 0.114, 0.018 and 0.949, respectively, which verifies the priority of the model in this paper. In addition the proportion of very satisfied people in the five dimensions of perceptual, topological, symbolic, living and spatial imagery are more than 50.00%, i.e., proving the application value of its model. The research in this paper reveals a kind of place spirit and digital layering phenomenon of laminar waterfront, which has a contributing role to the overall growth of people’s cognitive level.
