Using VR to assess the impact of seemingly life like and intelligent architecture on people's ability to follow instructions from a teacher

With the advancement of building material responsive buildings that can change their properties in real time according to their users or environment are becoming more common. Architecture that can think and react as if alive is becoming more feasible. As architecture begins to take on a life of its own, changing shape in response to the environment and inhabitants, we use virtual reality to ask if this is useful. We argue that immersive simulation is a useful means to study the potential impact of life-like architecture before going to the effort and expense of building intelligent animated structures that surround people. We have previously surrounded people with an animated life size visualisation of moving walls as they assemble jigsaw puzzles, to find that they feel more comfortable and can concentrate better when the walls around them appear to come to life. This paper extends that work by adding a teacher and responsive helpful patterns on the wall. Participants were again given the task of completing a jigsaw puzzle, this time without seeing what the completed puzzle should look like. Puzzle pieces were organised into groups. The teacher explained which group to do next and where groups connected. The conditions were: static blank, static patterned, moving patterned, and helpful patterned walls. Helpful walls responded to both the teacher and the test subject, through pictorial guidance. The objective measure of task performance was the number of puzzle pieces each user assembled. Subjective measures of experience were obtained through a post experiment questionnaire and an interview. This work is of relevance to those who will use surround visualisation or moving walls to enhance places where people learn, those that design animated and life like buildings, and in particular those that use virtual reality in this process.