Judgment and decision-making aspects on the use of virtual reality in volume studies

Abstract

The most common reason for using Virtual Reality (VR) as a communication medium in urban planning and building design is to provide decision makers with access to a shared virtual space, which can facilitate communication and collaboration in order to make better decisions. However, there is a risk that judgmental biases arise within the virtual space. The displaying of the VR-models and its content could be one way of changing the settings for the visual access to the virtual space and could thus influence the outcome of the decision making process. For that reason it is important to have knowledge of how different settings in and around the VR-medium influence the experience of the shared visual space that the VR-medium strives to achieve. In this case the decision-making process, perceptions of space, and the cognition process of decoding of information in the visual space are important. This paper investigates how reference points influence judgments of a volume study of a building and furthermore what visual cues that are used for spatial reasoning about volumes. The results show that the initial visual information has a profound impact on the decision, even when this information lacks in validity. © 2013, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong, and Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture (CASA), Department of Architecture-NUS, Singapore.