An official website of the United States government
The physical design of the learning environment has been shown to contribute significantly to student performance and educational outcomes. However, the existing literature on this topic relies primarily on generalized observations rather than on rigorous empirical testing. Broad trends in environmental impacts have been noted, but there is a lack of detailed evidence about how specific design variables can affect learning performance. The goal of this study was to apply a new approach in examining classroom design innovations. We developed a protocol to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom designs by measuring the physical responses of study participants as they interacted with different designs using a virtual reality platform. Our hypothesis was that virtual “test runs” can help designers to identify potential problems and successes in their work prior to its being physically constructed. The results of our initial pilot study indicated that this approach could yield important results about human responses to classroom design, and that the virtual environment seemed to be a reliable testing substitute when compared against real classroom environments. In addition to leading toward practical conclusions about specific classroom design variables, this project provides a new kind of research method and toolset to test the potential human impacts of a wide variety of architectural innovations.
more »
« less
Computationally Analyzing Biometric Data and Virtual Response Testing in Evaluating Learning Performance of Educational Setting Through
Due to construction costs, the human effects of innovations in architectural design can be expensive to test. Post-occupancy studies provide valuable data about what did and did not work in the past, but they cannot provide direct feedback for new ideas that have not yet been attempted. This presents designers with something of a dilemma. How can we harness the best potential of new technology and design innovation, while avoiding costly and potentially harmful mistakes? The current research use virtual immersion and biometric data to provide a new form of extremely rigorous human-response testing prior to construction. The researchers’ hypothesis was that virtual test runs can help designers to identify potential problems and successes in their work prior to its being physically constructed. The pilot study aims to develop a digital pre-occupancy toolset to understand the impact of different interior design variables of learning environment (independent variables) on learning performance (dependent variable). This project provides a practical toolset to test the potential human impacts of architectural design innovations. The research responds to a growing call in the field for evidence-based design and for an inexpensive means of evaluating the potential human effects of new designs. Our research will address this challenge by developing a prototype mobile brain-body imaging interface that can be used in conjunction with virtual immersion.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1757949
- PAR ID:
- 10143346
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 22th Conference of the Iberoamerican society of digital graphics
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 390 to 396
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation.more » « less
-
Abstract Applications for additive manufacturing (AM) continue to increase as more industries adopt the technology within their product development processes. There is a growing demand for designers to acquire and hone their design for AM (DfAM) intuition and generate innovative solutions with AM. Resources that promote DfAM intuition, however, historically default to physical or digitally non-immersive modalities. Immersive virtual reality (VR) naturally supports 3D spatial perception and reasoning, suggesting its intuitive role in evaluating geometrically complex designs and fostering DfAM intuition. However, the effects of immersion on DfAM evaluations are not well-established in the literature. This study contributes to this gap in the literature by examining DfAM evaluations for a variety of designs across modalities using varying degrees of immersion. Specifically, it observes the effects on the outcomes of the DfAM evaluation, the effort required of evaluators, and their engagement with the designs. Findings indicate that the outcomes from DfAM evaluations in immersive and non-immersive modalities are similar without statistically observable differences in the cognitive load experienced during the evaluations. Active engagement with the designs, however, is observed to be significantly different between immersive and non-immersive modalities. By contrast, passive engagement remains similar across the modalities. These findings have interesting implications on how organizations train designers in DfAM, as well as on the role of immersive modalities in design processes. Organizations can provide DfAM resources across different levels of immersion, enabling designers to customize how they acquire DfAM intuition and solve complex engineering problems.more » « less
-
Abstract Solving problems with additive manufacturing (AM) often means fabricating geometrically complex designs, layer-by-layer, along one or multiple directions. Designers navigate this 3D spatial complexity to determine the best design and manufacturing solutions to produce functional parts, manufacturable by AM. However, to assess the manufacturability of their solutions, designers need modalities that naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Creating physical parts offers such visualization but becomes expensive and time-consuming over multiple design iterations. While non-immersive simulations can alleviate this cost of physical visualization, adding digital immersion further improves outcomes from the visualization experience. This research, therefore, studies how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect: 1. determining the best solution for additively manufacturing a design and 2. the cognitive load experienced from completing the DfAM problem-solving experience. For the study, designers created a 3D manifold model and simulated manufacturing it in either CAx or VR. Analysis of the filtered data from the study shows that slicing and printing their designs in VR yields a significant change in the manufacturability outcomes of their design compared to CAx. No observable differences were found in the cognitive load experienced between the two modalities. This means that the experiences in VR may influence improvements to manufacturability outcomes without changes to the mental exertion experienced by the designers. This presents key implications for how designers are equipped to solve design problems with AM.more » « less
-
Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As the narrative becomes more structurally complex, due to choice-based branching and other player actions, designers need to employ commensurately capable models and visualizations to keep track of that growing complexity. However, previous models of interactive narrative have failed to fully capture interactive elements with automated, operationalized visualizations. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for automated construction of a framework-driven, graph-based representation of interactive narrative. This representation more fully and transparently models structural and interactive features of the narrative than did prior approaches. We present an initial evaluation of this representation, based on modified cognitive walkthroughs performed by interactive narrative design and research experts from our research team, and we describe the takeaways for future improvement on interactive narrative modeling and analysis.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.5151/sigradi2018-1875
