The New Mirror: Reflecting on inhabitant behaviour in VR and VR visualisation

Abstract

Technology inevitably evolves and develops rapidly in the modern era, industries and professions continue to strive in integrating, adapting and utilising these advancements to improve, optimise and improve the process of design to manufacture to the user experience. One such system that fits into this category is the advent of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. The numerous possibilities to which these visually and spatially immersive systems opportunities for immense innovation often lacks direction or an ultimate goal thus rendering this piece of software to often be little more than a visualisation tool.This paper recognises the unique position that VR allows and seeks to interrogate and deconstruct current, traditional design processes to better utilise VR in aiding and reinforcing the idea of partial testing of ideas and concepts throughout the design cycle. Different sciences such as psychology, processes and automation from computational design and considerations within software development will be employed and injected into the broader architectural context in which this research presides. In addition to the VR headset, eye tracking external hardware are integrated to develop a seamless tool and workflow that allows us, as designers to better interrogate clients behaviour within our designed digital representations which leads to validations, evaluations and criticisms of our actions within the architectural realm.