User Study on Virtual Reality for Design Reviews in Architecture

Virtual reality is a candidate to become the preferred interface for architectural design review, but the effectiveness and usability of such systems is still an issue. We put together a multidisciplinary team to implement a test methodology and system to compare VR with 2D interaction, with a coherent test platform using Rhinoceros as industry-standard CAD software. A direct and valid comparison of the two setups is made possible by using the same software for both conditions. We designed and modeled three similar CAD models of a 2 two-story villa (1 for the training and 2 for the test) and we implanted 13 artificial errors, simulating common CAD issues. Users were asked to find the errors in a 10 minutes fixed-time session for each setup respectively. We completed our test with 10 students from the design and architecture faculty, with proven experience of the 2D version of the CAD. We did not find any significant differences between the two modalities in cognitive workload, but the user preference was clearly towards VR. The presented work may provide interesting insights for future human-centered studies and to improve future VR architectural applications.