Understanding Spatial Perception and Visual Modes in the Review of Architectural Designs

Abstract

We investigate how a person's perception of space in di erent visual modes relates to common computational spatial measures for environment designs. The three spatial measures, grounded in Space-Syntax analysis, are used to capture di erent aspects of a design such as visibility, accessibility, and organization.We perform two studies involving novice users and the experts. First, we conduct a perceptual study to find out how novice users perceive these spatial measures when exploring and environment design using di erent visual modes including 2D blueprints, 3D first-person view, and room-scale virtual reality. A correlation analysis between the users' perceptual ratings and the spatial measures indicates that virtual reality is the most e ective of the three methods. We conclude that virtual reality provides the requisite fidelity needed to su ciently capture subtle aspects of 3D space, needed to perceive accessibility, visibility, and organization of an environment. On the other hand, 2D blueprints and 3D first-person exploration often fail to convey the spatial measures. In the second study, experts are asked to evaluate and rank the design blueprints for each spatial measure. The expert observations are in strong agreement with the spatial measures for accessibility and organization, but not for visibility in some cases. This indicates that even experts have difficulty understanding spatial aspects of an architectural design from 2D blueprints alone.