Can you help me concentrate room?

Abstract

Would a room in which the walls appear to come to life, be a pleasant place and would it help or hinder concentration? On the doorstep of life-like architecture we use virtual reality to begin to answer these questions. We are brought to this doorstep through the potential convergence of emerging adaptive, reactive and organic architecture and the approaches that have made life like virtual agents both engaging and useful. The scene is set by introducing the concept of Adaptive Appraisive Architecture, in which a building could appear to exhibit life like appearance and behaviour. While being impressive would such a building be pleasant and useful? Before building the physical structure or coding the artificial intelligence this paper measures the impact of being within a room with moving walls on experience and performance. To do this we gave test subjects two jigsaw puzzles and placed them within a life size simulation where the walls move then remain static. The impact of this difference is measured on experience through questionnaire and post interview. The impact on performance is measured in terms of the amount of the puzzle solved. The relevance of the results are not constrained to adaptive architecture as they add to the body of knowledge that relate distractions to concentration.