Calit2 Wayfinding Project
Dr. Eduardo Macagno, ANFA's immediate past president and Professor of Biological Sciences at University of California San Diego (UCSD), and Dr. Eve Edelstein, ANFA Research Fellow and President of Innovative Design Science, and colleagues at UCSD have been pioneering research on how to find one's way in the built environment.Their approach utilizes cutting-edge scientific methodologies to inform research-based design. The team has made use of UCSD's Calit2 'StarCAVE', an innovative 3D, fully immersive and human scale virtual reality facility, to study human reactions to various architectural elements. Brain responses from wearable sensory arrays are synchronized with recordings of human activity patterns as they navigate through full-scale 3D building models. Electroencephalography (EEG) measurements of brain activity, and electrooculography (EOG) to detect eye movements and gaze position, enable the researchers to analyze subjects' physiological and neurological responses as they move through virtual simulations of both familiar and unfamiliar environments.
The team hopes to develop a greater understanding of how humans create and use ‘cognitive maps’ as they travel through spaces. Initial research suggests that in ambiguous surroundings people use increasingly subtle cues to find their way. Ideally, this knowledge will inform the design of buildings through which people are able to navigate more easily, as well as the creation of built settings of all architectural types that better serve the range of human needs and activities.
HMC Architects, a firm renowned for its design of educational, healthcare and government buildings, acknowledged the benefits of this research, providing donations since 2009 exceeding $150,000, to help fund the project. For additional information about this research, please see the following two articles written by the research team: Neural Responses during Navigation in the Virtual Aided Design Laboratory: Brain Dynamics of Orientation in Architecturally Ambiguous Space and Wireless Physiological Monitoring and Ocular Tracking: 3D Calibration in a Fully-Immersive Virtual Health Care Environment.