II-NEW: Virtual Reality Infrastructure and Technology Development to Support Architectural Education and Basic Research in Immersive Design, Embodied Interaction, Spatial Cognition

Immersive virtual environments offer tremendous potential for fundamental and transformative advances in education, training, rehabilitation, architectural design, as well as a wide range of other application areas. The technology has special potential to enhance the process of architectural design by enabling designers to work with their ideas at full scale from the earliest stages of the design process, and to experience the interior spaces of their designed structures from a firsthand egocentric perspective before they are built. The research and educational opportunities made possible by the requested equipment will enable designers and their clients to experience a virtual environment as if the designers and their clients were truly standing in the physical environment that is represented by the virtual environment, and to make decisions based on their experience in the virtual world that are equivalent to the decisions that they would have made as a result of a similar experience in the physical world. The project will teach students of architectural design the value of developing their design ideas from an egocentric as well as allocentric perspective. Through this work, architects, and their clients, will be able to make reliable design decisions that can enhance the livability of a planned space based on their first-person experience of the 3D spatial layout. The project will enable archaeologists, historians, city planners, tourists, and others to gain an intrinsic, egocentric understanding of the spatial layout of large, remote sites through virtual exploration.

Intellectual Merit

An interdisciplinary team consisting of an associate professor of computer science in the college of science and engineering and an associate professor of architecture in the college of design requested funding for three pieces of major equipment and related supplies that will enable them to (a) pursue a multi-faceted research agenda in the development of groundbreaking methods to enhance the cognitive and perceptual realism of immersive virtual experiences, leveraging fundamental insights from visual perception and cognition, and (b) maximize the potential of virtual reality technology to fundamentally enhance the process of design education, emphasizing the importance of integrating an experiential understanding of planned spaces into the earliest stages of the design process. The proposal requests funding for the purchase of (a) a wide field of view head mounted display with an embedded stereo eye tracking system that the researchers will augment with lightweight, close-range depth sensors and a custom-built dual camera and mirror system to achieve a convergence-adaptable stereoscopic video-see-through augmented reality capability, (b) a set of cameras that will enable real time tracking throughout the full extent of the space available in a virtual reality design lab, and (c) an untethered, moderate field of view head-mounted display with optional optical see through capabilities that will, in conjunction with a backpack-worn laptop computer, allow unencumbered free physical movement through large virtual spaces and, in conjunction with the other head-mounted display, enable the project to pursue research in self-embodied multi-person interaction in immersive virtual environments.

Broader Impact

The requested equipment will benefit society by permitting research that will advance an understanding of how people can have experiences in immersive virtual environments that are equivalent to experiences in real world environments. This equipment will support significant advances in design education by enabling the broader effective use of virtual environments technology in teaching fundamental concepts of visual imagination and will support closer interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students in computer science, architecture and design. The project will promote science and engineering to the general public through community outreach such as through frequent lab tours for local K-12 students, and will promote participation in science through mentoring and summer programs for middle and high school students.