Understanding spatial perception and visual modes in the review of architectural designs

Spatial analysis of floor plans is typically constrained to blueprints. We investigate how a person’s perception of space in different visual modes relates to common computational spatial measures for environment designs. The three spatial measures, grounded in Space-Syntax analysis, are used to capture different aspects of a design such as visibility, accessibility, and organization. We perform two studies involving novice users and the experts. First, we conduct a perceptual study to find out how novice users perceive these spatial measures when exploring and environment design using different visual modes including 2D blueprints, 3D first-person view, and room-scale virtual reality. A correlation analysis between the users’ perceptual ratings and the spatial measures indicates that virtual reality is the most eective of the three methods. We conclude that virtual reality provides the requisite delity needed to suciently capture subtle aspects of 3D space, needed to perceive accessibility, visibility, and organization of an environment. On the other hand, 2D blueprints and 3D rst-person exploration often fail to convey the spatial measures. In the second study, experts are asked to evaluate and rank the design blueprints for each spatial 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 diculty understanding spatial aspects of an architectural design from 2D blueprints alone.