CHS: Small: Transforming the Architectural Design Review Process through Collaborative Embodiment in HMD-Based Immersive Virtual Environments

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Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology has the potential to fundamentally transform the architectural design and building industries, by enabling individuals and groups to achieve an accurate and intuitive experiential understanding of a designed environment before it is built. To help realize this promise, the PI and her team will in this project pursue a multi-faceted research agenda that seeks to develop and deploy low-cost, multi-user, head-mounted-display (HMD) based IVR technology to more effectively support the decision-making process in architecture / engineering / construction design reviews. The research will address two critical challenges: to enable individual stakeholders to achieve a more accurate understanding of the 3D spatial structure and affordances for action in a designed interior space and to reliably assess its aesthetic and functional suitability under realistic use conditions; and to facilitate effective collaborative design review by enabling groups of stakeholders to be jointly immersed in the virtual model during the review process. Project outcomes promise to offer immediate benefits to architects, builders, and their clients, who will be able to more readily evaluate the suitability of designed spaces to meet their needs. The work also has the potential to enhance the effectiveness with which IVR technology can be used for a wider variety of collaborative and experiential purposes, in areas from education and training to psychotherapy and rehabilitation. In addition, the research has the potential to support significant advances in design education, by enabling the broader effective use of IVR technology in teaching fundamental concepts of visual imagination, and to foster closer interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students in computer science, architecture and design.The ambitious research plan consists of three key components. The PI and her team will develop robust methods for providing individual users with the ability to see a visually faithful, dynamically rendered 3D representation of their own body while they are physically moving about within an HMD-based IVR, along with a quantitative assessment of the impact of alternative embodiment methodologies on the accuracy of peoples' spatial perception judgments in the virtual environment. The team will also develop robust methods for providing multiple users with the ability to see each other while being co-located in a wide-area, HMD-based IVR, along with a qualitative assessment of best-practice representational approaches for supporting effective interpersonal communication and simultaneous accurate spatial understanding when multiple users are immersed as a group in a shared virtual environment. Finally, the team will create a system for populating a designed environment with realistically behaving and interactively responsive autonomous virtual agents, along with qualitative and quantitative testing of the impact on spatial perception and functional suitability judgments from experiencing dynamically populated, as opposed to static or unpopulated, immersive virtual environments, plus related efforts that will assess the subjective and objective realism of the agents' dynamic behavior.