An Affordable Immersive Environment in Beginning Design Studio Education

Abstract

This paper presents work exploring the potential of virtual reality (VR) within an affordable environmentin the early years of architectural education has been limited. Through an immersive environmentsystem in the studio, students create space by manipulating solids and voids while evaluating theanthropometric relations of the proposed solution. The students are able to study and test conceptualdetails in a virtual environment from the very beginning of their architectural design project.We carried out a usability study in order to assess student perception of the usefulness of varioussystem attributes for diverse tasks. Thirty-five surveys were collected from the students who had usedthe system. Observations indicate that within the architectural context, virtual reality techniquesinvolving depth perception can convey relevant information to students more efficiently and with lessmisrepresentation than traditional techniques.