Hotmail
Get lost ... and get better architecture
Getting lost and getting a cue
For her group’s proof-of-principle study, the Calit2 space took the place of a hospital, with its virtual replica featuring the building’s lobby, exterior courtyards and some rooms and corridors. In the lobby, the researchers added a few details, including a colored door, projected shadows, and a version of an outdoor teddy bear sculpture made of eight massive granite boulders. The intent was to make the lobby as photorealistic as possible, Edelstein said. “And so it’s rich with visual cues that could assist a person in navigation.”
In contrast, the researchers successively removed visual cues in the building’s south corridor. Study volunteers were then given navigational tasks and remote controls to help them get through the virtual building, and the scientific team pored over the brain responses as the participants found their way.
“The first thing that was very fascinating to us occurred before the analysis of the brain wave response,” Edelstein said. “It was an observation of the increasingly subtle cues that people used.”
The angle of incoming sunlight, the researchers discovered, was a major cue for many participants.
“That’s what humans and animals have been using for millennia and we actually remove that in most architecture,” Edelstein said. “And that was one of the first things that people told us they were using.”
With that cue removed in the virtual corridor, people began looking for cues as fine as the carpet pattern.
Although the team is still analyzing the results, Edelstein said the experiment supported the concept that scientists could synchronously record the brainwaves of individuals moving within a real-time virtual reality environment and correlate their brain activity and travel patterns in that virtual world. A larger-scale study, she hopes, will expand on results and delve into the behavior of navigating people.
The rich complexity of a healthcare environment, with the contrasting needs for specialists and patients, young and old, sick and well, may be the best place to begin sorting out what cues the brain recognizes and which it seems to ignore.
But Edelstein says the same questions could be addressed in educational environments or commercial spaces within a city.
“It’s about looking at the human response beneath the level of culture,” she said. “If we can answer questions for healthcare settings, I argue that we are answering questions for all spaces that serve the breadth of needs.”
Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta who studies how neuronal firing patterns affect decision-making, praised the study as “a perfect use of neuroscience to peer into someone’s brain while they do something important.”
Berns, who has followed a similar thread with his new book, "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently," said the relative mobility of EEG technology could lend itself to poring over the brain waves of people in existing buildings as well.
“I think virtual reality is a helpful starting point for design,” he said, adding, “I’m an advocate of getting a person into a physical space.”
A before-and-after test could measure the success of a hallway designed to be navigation-friendly, for example.
“If this worked, potentially an even more beneficial use would be in urban planning,” he said. “Getting lost in a building is one thing, but getting lost in a city is another.”
Beyond navigation, Berns said he could imagine the technique being used to record responses to a space intended to be inspiring or surprising — and perhaps to prevent the design from going overboard.
“I think it’s a bit of a fine line between inspiring because it affords surprises in the environment,” he said, “and one that’s completely disorienting.”
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
View popularLowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM FRONTIERS |
 Tourist or terrorist? Computer knows |
| Add Frontiers headlines to your news reader: |
Resource guide