Virtual and Augmented Reality for Architecture and Design

Elisângela Vilar, Ernesto Filgueiras, Francisco Rebelo, Elisângela Vilar, Ernesto Filgueiras, Francisco Rebelo

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000615555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Virtual Reality
• Index: Computer Science

Virtual Reality (VR) is the paradigm wherein people use a computer to interact with something which is not real but provides a real-life experience. It is one of the most advanced interfaces between users and computers, where people can interact with a virtual model in real-time allowing them to visualize and manipulate representations of the real world. Together with Augmented Reality (AR), which adds layers of information to the real environment, VR is a powerful tool for designers and architects in the development of new responsive products, systems and built environments, that meets user's needs. VR and AR are tools that enhance design and architecture students' comprehension about complex and abstract concepts.

Informative and accessible, this publication presents, analyses, and discusses the integration and use of Virtual and Augmented Reality within the process of planning, development and research for Design and Architecture. The book also presents case studies with multidisciplinary collaborative work.

This book is meant for practitioners and academics alike, as it examines specific aspects related to the use of new technologies in the field of Architecture and Design, highlighting its application in areas such as education, heritage, research, and methodologies, bridging the gap between Architectural and Design abstraction and human requirements through technology.

1 Virtual Reality in Architecture and Design Twenty Years of Experience

Elisângela Vilar,^1,2,* Francisco Rebelo,^1,2 Paulo Noriega,^1,2 Ernesto Filgueiras¹ and Emília Duarte³

¹ CIAUD, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Arquitetura. Rua Sá Nogueira, Polo Universitário, Alto da Ajuda, 1349-055, Lisboa, Portugal.

² ITI/LARSYS, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Arquitetura. Rua Sá Nogueira, Polo Universitário, Alto da Ajuda, 1349-055, Lisboa, Portugal.

³ Universidade Europeia, IADE, Laureate International Universities, and UNIDCOM/IADE, Unidade de Investigação em Design e Comunicação, Av. D. Carlos I, 4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal.

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

1. Introduction

The advances and new demands related to Virtual Reality (VR) has made this technology one of the focuses of innovative initiatives for researching in Architecture and Design scientific areas. Many studies have been developed concentrating on both, the technology itself and all the interaction issues that could arise from this, along with its use as a new interaction environment, where it is possible to simulate a paramount of alternatives that would be impossible to materialize in the physical world. In the last two decades, researchers from different areas of expertise got together to discuss and research VR, its use and implications, as well as its application as an interaction environment to develop and/or to access new design paradigms considering the user behavior. With this, in the early 2000s, a group from ergonomics, design, architecture, and psychology framed the ergoUX Lab at the University of Lisbon, and started to focus their activity on VR-based methodologies for Design and Architecture fields, being pioneers in this field in Portugal. From the beginning to now, a body of knowledge about the use of VR for studies focusing on the observation of human behavior was built, having developed research of great relevance in the areas of design and architecture, namely for the design of safety signs, way finding in complex buildings, new interaction paradigms in smart buildings, and the development of training simulators.

With this context, this chapter is divided in five sections. The first section is dedicated to the introduction, followed by a second section for an overview of the main concepts related with virtual reality and a third section about VR applications and the research using VR for design and architecture that has been done worldwide. The fourth section presents the ergoUX Lab and its research along last twenty years, followed by the conclusion that will be presented in the fifth section, discussing future trends and expectations.

2. An Overview on Virtual Reality (VR)—Main Concepts and Applications

From 1965, with the Sutherland’s “The Ultimate Display”, (Sutherland 1965) to the present, VR has evolved and became one of the most promising tool for several areas, such as entertainment, health, training and academic research. With the evolution of this technology, VR/AR devices seems to be the new trend to enrich the way information is accessed and presented (Li et al. 2018), and from a scientific/academic point of view, VR has become a powerful tool to study future scenarios, where new trends can be tested and new paradigms can be created.

VR can be defined as a way of transporting a person to a digital reality in which he/she is not physically present but feels like he/she is (Rebelo et al. 2012). Presence is a key concept to VR. Lombard and Ditton (1997) explored and discussed the concept of presence, and presented six categories for this, mainly related to the field of intervention where the concept is applied to:

1. Presence as social richness—that is “the extent to which a medium is perceived as sociable, warm, sensitive, personal or intimate when it is used to interact with other people”;
2. Presence as realism—that is “the degree to which a medium can produce seemingly accurate representations of objects, events, and people”;
3. Presence as transportation—That implicates the idea of moving from/to, being this made of three distinct ways: You are there “in which the user is transported to another place”, It is here “in which another place and the objects within it are transported to the user”; and We are together, “in which two (or more) communicators are transported together to a place that they share”;
4. Presence as immersion—that highlights the perceptual and psychological immersion, in a way that the senses are immersed in the virtual world, and higher the isolation between worlds higher immersion/presence is.
5. Presence as social actor within medium—that is when the mediation between an actor that is not physically present at the same place as a the user is ignored, making user to react to the actor (even robots or virtual characters) as they were physically together; and,
6. Presence in the medium as social actor—that is when “basic social cues exhibited by the medium lead users to treat the medium as a social entity”.

Witmer and Singer (1998) state that a critical point to the effective use of the VR approach is to provide the users the means with which they could believe that they are in a place, even when they are physically in another, in a way to enhance the sense of presence. Thus, presence can be enhanced by the technology, but also by many other aspects of the interaction, such as the level of details of the virtual environment, and the created narrative and storytelling.

In this sense, immersion is a complementary concept in which the technology is the way to mediate physical and digital worlds, lower the perception of the real world, higher the immersion. So, the lower perception of the real world the user perceives (see, hear, touch), the greater the physical level of immersion (Rebelo et al. 2012). A classification of the types of immersion was proposed by Gutierrez et al. (2008) mainly considering the physical configuration of a VR user interface, varying from fully immersive to non-immersive. Thus, VR can be considered immersive when the interaction is mediated by, for example, a head-mounted display (HMD) and a tracker position sensor, or non-immersive, where the HMD is substituted by an external monitor (Gorini et al. 2011). It can also be considered semi-immersive when large projection screens, for example, are used as the VR user interface (Gutierrez et al. 2008). The interaction with the synthetic world is an important feature of VR and is mainly done through HMD and the CAVE system, for a fully immersive experience, or using large projection screens in which the VE are projected with 3D projectors and visualized with stereoscopic glasses (for a detailed description see Rebelo et al. 2012).

VR has been used in many fields of study, particularly in those in which the understanding of human behavior is the main key for developing solutions to certain issues, such as in design areas, including, product, graphic, architectural and interior design. With VR, simulated situations—many times representing alternatives for the future or situations that could be very difficult to consider in real environments (e.g., fire, subaquatic or spatial situations, medical interventions)—these are developed allowing researchers to study the main impacts on environments and artifacts design, potential user’s behaviors, potential risks, and to propose and test new solutions, or creating new paradigms.

According to Vilar and colleagues (2012), one of the most important features of VR is its flexibility to design a lot of diverse and often utopian worlds suitable for the study’s objectives and have higher variable control, which is very difficult to achieve when using real-world settings as an interaction environment. Some examples of this are the exploration of virtual environments (VEs) that can be done since from users exploring the virtual world in an egocentric manner (near to the real viewpoint) to flying above the environment to gain an exocentric viewpoint, and to interact with virtual objects, even with those that are unthinkable in real situation (e.g., moving walls, crossing a fire, breathing under water, flying). Nowadays, realistic-looking virtual environments combined with high engaged narratives allow a great control of experimental conditions and variables, while grating good ecological validity and replicability. Other advantages are the availability of avatars and/or embodied agents, which can assume the researcher’s or confederate’s role but with rigorously controlled behavior (Rebelo et al. 2012), and the automatic registration of all user’s interaction behaviors (e.g., paths, pauses, eye movements).

Covering a wide range of computer-mediated techniques and technological devices, VR allows users to be transported to a synthetic environment in which they are able to interact with it without being physically present (Teixeira et al. 2011). The interaction with VE has been successfully used for research in several fields of study such as Social/Cognitive Psychology, Ergonomics, Architecture, Design and Engineering. A variety of technological solutions can be found to fulfil researchers needs, from sophisticated Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) with 210° of field of view (i.e., Star VR/IMAX) to cardboards HMD (e.g., Google Cardboard), or even AR apps developed for mobile smartphones that can be easily created since the launch of the ARKit (for IOS system) and ARCore from Google.

Many advantages of VR systems are pointed out by authors (e.g., Jansen-Osmann 2002, Mantovani et al. 2001, Vilar et al. 2014a, Vilar et al. 2013b), such as: its cost-effectiveness when compared to the construction of physical setups; the control of the study’s variables are easier and more rigorous; the experience’s replication is facilitated; it provides scenarios that otherwise would be difficult/impossible to access (e.g., hazardous environments); important data can be automatically recorded; the system setup can be easily changed according research need; its use may overcome some ethical issues that may arise in human behavior research.Virtual Reality in Architecture and Design: Twenty Years of Experience 5

3. VR Research and Applications

Nowadays, VR devices can be found in places ranging from amusement parks in radical roller coasters to sophisticated scientific laboratories helping researchers to understand and answer advanced issues. According to Li and colleagues (2018), users are able to realize the highly immersive, holistic and realistic experience supported by a digital and physical world information, instead of just interact with 3D contents in a pure computer-generated environment.

The market is full of VR devices and applications, with different levels of experience and immersion and it is in growth. Reports about the global VR market (Fortune Business Insights 2020, Grand View Research 2020) point a VR market size valued in more than U$ 50 billion at 202, mostly boosted by the growing popularity of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concept in the United States market and by key factors such as technological advances, penetration in the consumer electronics industry, and the rising demand for virtual training across industry.

Among the contributions that technology is making to these sectors, Virtual Reality (VR) is creating immense opportunities for the leisure and tourism industries throughout the pre-visit phase, during the trip and at the post-visit stage (Marasco and Balbi 2019, Tussya...