-By David Rova and Eve Edelstein, PhD

Walking through a space, an individual’s experience is based on the building’s design—the architectural lines, movement, materials, and colors. What if that experience could not only happen before the building is ever constructed, but also it could be measured and used to inform design choices? The researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and designers at HMC Architects have joined together to pose that very question. Using a virtual reality lab to recreate the experience of walking through a finished space, designers and researchers will study human response, reactions, and perceptions to guide better design decisions.

The virtual reality lab, properly known as the StarCAVE, is a 360-degree, 16-panel, 3-D immersive environment. The lab enables researchers to digitally recreate building environments at actual scale. Using a wand-like control device, users can direct their own movement through this digitally developed environment while observing an accurate sight line, experiencing a sense of volume, and noticing adjacent buildings through framed views from the building model.

“We consider the StarCAVE to be a boundary technology that can inform us about how specific features of a building’s design affect human responses and also yield new insights on how the brain works,” says Eduardo Macagno, the founding dean of the Division of Biological Sciences at UCSD and president of the Academy of Neurosciences for Architecture (ANFA). After an ANFA workshop, Macagno decided to combine science and architecture by recruiting a team to investigate the effects of the environment on human performance, behavior, cognition, learning, and health using this revolutionary technology.

A team of designers at HMC Architects now meets regularly with the UCSD scientists to set priorities and test out developments to ensure that this new system works effectively with the architectural design process. The HMC team is working with Macagno to perfect an effective and cohesive research process along with top computational experts in virtual reality CAVE technologies and experts from UCSD Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience.

For designers, this technology provides a new stage to test intuitive thoughts on the environments created by gauging it further with virtual data—encouraging designers with a unique perspective that can be used towards developing more educated decisions and opportunities.

During early pilot studies, researchers used computational methods and newly developed software to demonstrate the means to synchronize the virtual world, behavioral responses, and brainwave activity. Advancing these original studies, the team is creating algorithms to modify building shapes while concurrently recording the user’s stress, visual, and cognitive changes—measuring the human reaction to various design choices. Electroencephalogram recordings will map the brain, eye movements, and heart responses.

“This technology ultimately allows us to put the ‘evidence’ into evidence-based design,” said Randy Peterson, FAIA, LEED AP, president and CEO of HMC Architects. “We are looking to develop a system that will give us information to validate the positive effects buildings can have on users of all types—from patients, doctors, and visitors in healthcare settings to students, teachers, researchers, and the general public in learning environments.”

The general goal of this research is to improve architectural choices and effectively use design dollars, but more specifically, this research aims to discover how evidence-based design can become a method for improving buildings that have highly important functions, like saving lives or educating our children. A motivating goal is to use data collected from this research in designing spaces that need high levels of mental acuity like emergency rooms, hospital wings, nurse stations, and classrooms to influence performance, safety, and productivity. A split-second decision, invisibly affected by architecture, may change or save lives.

This truly unique research is already improving design on significant HMC projects such as Phase 2 of the Rady School of Management at UCSD and the Center for Exceptional Children, which was one of the first projects in the study. The findings were illuminating, and the final design reflects the team’s research.

David Rova, an award-winning international designer, is a principal and the director of design for HMC Architects. Eve Edelstein, PhD, is trained as an architect and neuroscientist and is the senior vice president of research and design for HMC Architects. Both are based out of HMC’s San Diego office (www.hmcarchitects.com and www.twitter.com\HMCArchitects).