Perceptual evaluation of space in virtual environments

Floor plan designs and their spatial analysis are typically constrained to blueprints and 2D projections of 3D models. Computing appropriate spatial measures from such representations provides a standard way of quantifying important aspects of the design. We wish to investigate whether a person's perceptual exploration of a space would agree with such spatial measures, that is, whether a person can roughly infer such measures by exploring a space. We perform two studies, one involving novices and the other experts. First, we conduct a perceptual study to discover whether a novice user's perception of spatial measures depends on the mode used to explore the space. Our analysis considers three spatial measures, grounded in Space-Syntax, that characterize key aspects of a design such as visibility, accessibility, and organization. We compare three modes of exploration: 2D blueprints, first-person view in a 3D simulation, and a 3D virtual reality simulation with teleportation. A correlation analysis between the users' perceptual ratings and the spatial measures, indicates that virtual reality is the most effective of the three methods, while 2D blueprints and 3D first-person exploration often fail entirely to convey the spatial measures. In the second study, experts are asked to evaluate and rank the design blueprints for each 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 architecture design from 2D blueprints alone.