Delineating the Necessary Level of Realism in Virtual Reality

My Ph.D. research uses virtual reality in order to investigate both navigation and physiological responses to indoor environments. I plan to investigate the level of realism in VR that is necessary to elicit realistic behavior and use this information to motivate and evaluate (virtual) redesigns of a building in VR. The goal of my research will be to provide an empirically based approach to architectural design that complements traditional architectural practice. Towards this end, I will work with the Cooper Hewitt Museum (part of the Smithsonian) in New York. I have the rare opportunity to conduct research in VR and test in the same real world environment as they have provided me with a high-resolution point cloud model of the museum and the permission to conduct my real world studies at the museum. In the first part of my PhD I will investigate different behaviours in the real and in the virtual Cooper Hewitt Museum. In particular, I will examine the relationship between degree of realism and navigation behaviour as well as the transfer of environmental appraisals including physiological responses. I will perform one experiment per behaviour. In a second part, I will work with the Cooper Hewitt Museum and established architects to generate design interventions in the museum space and evaluate these redesigns in terms of our findings about navigation behaviour and environmental appraisal in the first part. The expected outputs of my PhD are an understanding of the degree of realism in virtual reality that is necessary for capturing human behaviour and the validation of VR as a research tool for evidence-based design.