Can You Help Me Concentrate Room?

Mohamad Nadim Adi and David Roberts

University of Salford, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT

Would a room in which the walls appear to come to life, be a pleasant place and would it help or hinder concentration? On the doorstep of life-like architecture we use virtual reality to begin to answer these questions. We are brought to this doorstep through the potential convergence of emerging adaptive, reactive and organic architecture and the approaches that have made life like virtual agents both engaging and useful. The scene is set by introducing the concept of Adaptive Appraisive Architecture, in which a building could appear to exhibit life like appearance and behaviour. While being impressive would such a building be pleasant and useful? Before building the physical structure or coding the artificial intelligence this paper measures the impact of being within a room with moving walls on experience and performance. To do this we gave test subjects two jigsaw puzzles and placed them within a life size simulation where the walls move then remain static. The impact of this difference is measured on experience through questionnaire and post interview. The impact on performance is measured in terms of the amount of the puzzle solved. The relevance of the results are not constrained to adaptive architecture as they add to the body of knowledge that relate distractions to concentration.

KEYWORDS: Architectural Design, Construction, experimental methods, large-format displays, Flow, Concentration, Adaptive, Intelligent, Social.

INDEX TERMS: I.3 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architecture: Three-dimensional displays; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism: Animation; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism: Virtual Reality; I.6 [Simulation and Modeling]: Types of Simulation: Animation; J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Architecture; J.6 [Computer-Aided Engineering]: Computer-aided design

1 1. INTRODUCTION

Could people concentrate better if the rooms in which they worked had walls that appeared to come to life around them? The potential convergence of organic and flexible architecture, intelligent buildings, and social cognition models for virtual humans and robots puts us at the doorstep of buildings that might not only appear life-like but could appear to have social consciousness. While being impressive, this paper makes a first step towards answering the question, would it actually be useful?

Before we go to the expense of creating such buildings or designing the intelligent system behind them, it is worth doing some simple experiments to begin to answer this question. This is the first of such experiments that uses simulation to measure the impact of organic moving walls on an occupant’s performance and experience.

There has always been a continuous relationship between architecture and its users. Since the beginning of time, man has been keen to change his environment in order to make life more comfortable. The earliest of these changes were cave paintings, which were made to make the living environment more comfortable and more importantly to record the events that were happening during that time. This also had a psychological effect on the occupants as it personalized their living quarters and helped them identify more with their environments. Inuksuks and Totems are still seen today as markings so that areas are considered safer or more habitable. Such tradition is still continued today, when workers customize their work environment i.e. putting family pictures or paintings or when people change the interior decoration of their housing to create a more comfortable setting to live or work in.

With the current advances in building technologies and computer science, particularly in the fields of programming and Virtual reality, responsive buildings are emerging in architectural practice. What is meant by responsive architecture is a building that reacts to its users by changing colour, shape, sound, smell or all of these combined. Although these buildings attract more people and provide more experiences for them than conventional static buildings, there are some drawbacks. Such buildings are in a way unable to evolve beyond a certain set of pre-programmed responses placed there by their designers. They also have no social reasoning, meaning that they cannot deal with any situations other than those that fit their predefined standards. Another drawback is that responsive buildings have no long- or short-term goals. These characteristics are likely to make building that at first appear impressive, disappoint in the long term, just as was found in purely reactive virtual humans and robots.

The idea of a moving or flexible building is not new, nomadic cultures have been using movable buildings for thousands of years in very different environments. These range from deserts in Africa and the Middle East to the frozen lands of Antarctica [1]. In general those who relied on cattle and hunting communities that had to be constantly on the move used these types of buildings (tents). Nowadays more and more architects are utilizing new technology to create more flexible architecture that can cater to a variety of needs and that can change its appearance in accordance to its users or environment. Such examples include the H2O expo in the Netherlands [2], Hypo Surface in Birmingham [3], Sky Ear [4, 5], The Central mosques in Mecca and Medina, The Ice project in Marunchi [6] and The Dynamic or Rotating tower in Dubai and Moscow [7]. The number of responsive buildings is growing rapidly now especially with the introduction of new building materials that are pushing the limits of what can be achieved (like interactive lighting, smart skin and Christie Microtiles) [1, 8, 9, 10, 11].

m.n.h.adi@pgr.salford.ac.uk , d.j.roberts@salford.ac.uk

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IEEE Virtual Reality 201020 - 24 March, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA978-1-4244-6238-4/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

1.1 1.1 Concept: Adaptive Appraisive Architecture Intelligence is being built into architecture to help it to adapt to

the needs and behaviour of occupants. There is currently much interest in intelligent buildings turning things off or down when they are not being used. The concept of reactive architecture has been around for some time [12] but what constitutes as reactive architecture is ever changing [13, 14]. In the simplest form architecture can be said to be reactive if its design is in reaction to something (personal, social or cultural event). Moving structures and materials have been linked to sensors so that a building can react to the movement of its occupants. However, virtual characters that simply reacted quickly become boring and people's belief in them being life-like and intelligent soon waned. Combining long and short term planning through modelling reactive and deliberative decision making, while appraising how others might perceive an action has given virtual characters the appearance of social cognition. Such characters remain engaging far longer and been shown useful in socially driven role play [15, 16]. Projects like ADA showed that people could consider a room or space to be intelligent or a social character if it showed a certain level of intelligent interaction. [17, 18] We bring together the work on adaptive buildings and on virtual humans that can appraise how their action might be perceived, to introduce the concept of adaptive appraisive architecture. Such architecture might consider the needs and mood of all of its occupants in order to adapt its appearance or even structure to improve the group's experience and/or performance.

2 2. EXPERIMENT

We now describe the approach, measurements and equipment of this first experiment. The aim of this experiment is to test how people's performance and experience might be affected if the walls around them appeared to come to life.

2.1 2.1 Approach Each test gave a subject a jigsaw puzzle for each condition and

asked them to solve it within a reconfigurable large screen display, that we call the octave. The octave was configured like a five wall CAVE. In condition A the walls of the OCTAVE remained blank. In condition B the computer graphic walls appeared to come to life around them. An animation of a moving room of the same dimensions as those of the cubic display was projected on the display walls. This meant that the subject would have no need to use a navigation joystick and thus making the experience more natural and less stressful. The walls of the simulated room moved inwards and outwards up to 0.5m. The movement was created by running a film of the 3D model on each of the walls and the floor. A single cell like pattern was used. We felt that patterns that reminded the subject of a peaceful environment, such as woodland or sea, might affect results and so avoid their use. This kept us clear of the argument that performance increase is due to the relaxing effect of waves, as this has been explored in the complementary medicine field. Figure 1 shows key frames of the animation that was projected around the subject for the moving wall condition.

We used a within subjects design for the experiment. To ensure that participants are not performing better because they were getting used to the procedure, we varied the order of puzzles and environments. This meant that some started with puzzle A and some with B; and half were inside a simulation of moving walls first whereas the rest where first surrounded by blank display walls. Test subjects who participated were healthy individuals in the age range of 20 to 30 years. To our knowledge none of them

had any disabilities. Two different puzzles were used, one for each task. This is done so that users did not repeat the same task again and so that variation in performance would not be attributed to repetition. Care was taken to insure that both puzzles were of the same difficulty. Both puzzles were 160 pieces each and the boarder of each one was pre-made in order to make the task easier and quicker for users as pilot runs showed that users who spent more than 25 minutes on each puzzle were bored and lost focus.

Figure 1: Sequence of key frames through which the wall animation was interpolated.

Since the virtual environment used was the same size as the Octave, there was no need for navigation equipment. Stereo glasses were not used because we did not want people to be effected in any way by wearing them. Stereo glasses reduce light going to the eyes, block out some peripheral vision, and can cause eye strain. We decided not to use furniture as its design and comfort could affect performance and experience. Studio lights were used to help subjects see the puzzle and insure that the ambient light level were approximately the same in both normal and virtual environments.

2.2 2.2 Measurements Task performance was measured in terms of percentage of the

puzzle solved. The border was already completed ready for the subjects. The percentage of the non-border pieces attached in the correct place was measured. The posture and movements (including approximate gaze) of subjects were recorded on video and by photograph. A questionnaire asked a set of questions and counter questions grouped to measure people’s perception of comfort, enjoyment of the task, and concentration. A scale of 1 to 5 was used. A post experiment interview followed a standard set of questions following the same themes plus open ended discussion.

2.3 Experimental Environment The test environment used for this experiment is the OCTAVE

which is an immersive projection system. This test environment is well suited because it surrounds the subject in a life size simulation, and thus can gives the impression of being within a simulated room better than looking into that room through a desktop display. The Octave has eight movable large display modules. In this experiment the modules were arranged to approximate a five sided CAVE. Each of the five surfaces displayed mono projection from a Christie S+3K Stereo DLP, running at a resolution of 1400x1050 at 102Hz. Active stereo was disabled for this experiment so that the subjects did not need to wear stereo glasses. The viewpoint of each image was fixed to the centre of the cube. The cluster simulation ran across five graphics

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nodes connected across a 10Gbs, 250Mps Cisco 4900M switch. Each graphics node was a Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstation, with quad-core 2.6Ghz AMD Opteron 64-bit processors, 8Gb memory and an Nvidia Quadro FX5600 graphics card. Each ran the rendering for a single viewpoint perspective, one for each projector.

To film the subjects we used two cameras: one for filming the face of the test subject while the other filmed the body. This was done in order to pick up on any trends in body language or facial expressions.

3 RESULTS

The vast majority (90%) of subjects performed better at solving the puzzle when the walls around them moved. On average people managed to get 14.29% more of the puzzle done when the walls moved. Figure 2 shows the performance of test subjects in Virtual and Normal environments. Performance was measured by calculating the percentage of puzzle completion in each environment. 90% of the subjects performed better in the virtual environment. With probability (P) values for tests between 0.000 and 0.138 most of the results are statistically very significant with 100% chance of results on a bigger sample matching our experiment results and in the lowest situation the chance would be 86.2% which is still very high and could be improved by having a bigger sample size.

Figure 2. Scores of test subjects in both Neutral and Active environments (P 0.000)

Figure 3 shows the results of the test subjects who commenced the experiment in the normal environment. These form the majority (15 out of 20). 93.3% of them performed better in the virtual environment. While results in this group are strong one concern was that the increase of performance was mainly due to the fact that test subjects were repeating the task (even if it is a different puzzle) thus the necessity for more investigation was present.

Figure 3: The scores of test subjects in both Neutral and Active environments. Experiments started in the normal environment first. (P 0.002)

Figure 4 shows the counter test: results of the subjects who commenced the experiment in the virtual environment first. This was done to eliminate the fear that the performance increase was

due to the test subjects repeating the task or getting used to the test procedure. 80 % of subjects performed better in this group.

Figure 4: The scores of test subjects in both Neutral and Active environments. Experiments started in the Active environment first. (P 0.107)

Figure 5 examines the scores of subjects who did puzzle A in the Normal environment and puzzle B in the Active environment. The general trend of performance increase is still apparent with 92.8% of subjects performing better.

Figure 5: The scores of test subjects who did puzzle A in the Neutral environment and puzzle B in the Active environment. (P 0.001)

Figure 6 examines the scores of subjects who did puzzle B in the Neutral environment and puzzle A in the Active environment. In general 83.3% of subjects performed better.

Figure 6: The scores of test subjects who did puzzle B in the Neutral environment and puzzle A in the Active environment. (P 0.138)

Analysis of the video and photographs did not yield clear results. Pictures comparing the postures of the same subjects in both conditions are shown in Figure 7.

Data from questionnaires suggest that when the walls moved, 65% of subjects felt more comfortable, 60% preferred to work there, and 73 % found it easier to concentrate.

During post interview subjects comments about their experience of the moving walls varied from being indifferent to preferring to work in it. Nobody commented that they disliked the moving walls or felt uncomfortable within them. The main complaint of all subjects was sitting directly on the floor and the discomfort caused by it. 12 individual Comments indicated that people felt lonely when the walls didn't move but felt calmed when they did.

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One subject made said the walls looked stars in the sky at night and how it made him feel calm.

Figure 7: Postures of three subjects across the two conditions

One of the most interesting correlations between subjective and objective measures was found for the subject who performed best across both conditions. She was heard to hum when doing the puzzle in the static condition but not when the walls moved. She volunteered in the interview that she had felt something was missing in the former so started to hum but did not feel that anything was missing in the latter.

4 V. DISCUSSION

This experiment is a long way from showing that a socially conscious building would be useful and pleasing. However, it does test an important prerequisite question: what might the impact be of moving walls of organic appearance on an occupant’s performance and experience. It is clear that there is a trend towards that people performing better when the walls around them move. The obvious shortcoming of this experiment is that it was not symmetrical either in terms of the primary condition (the walls) or the secondary condition (the puzzle). A second shortcoming is that the walls were not displayed in the static condition. However, the results do appear clear. Four in five people experiencing the moving walls first performed better when the walls moved, compared to nine out of ten who experienced them second. Both questionnaires and interviews show that most people prefer moving walls. In particular they found moving walls to have a calming effect and to improve concentration. The only measurement that didn't yield clear results was the posture and movements of the test subjects. We thought that people would be seen glancing at the walls as they moved but this was not particularly apparent.

5 VI. CONCLUSION

The potential convergence of organic and flexible architecture, intelligent buildings, and social cognition models for virtual humans and robots, puts us at the doorstep of buildings that might not only appear life-like but could appear to have social consciousness. While being impressive, this paper makes a first

step towards answering the question, would it actually be useful and pleasant? Before we go to the expense of creating such buildings or designing the intelligent system behind them, it is worth doing some simple experiments to begin to answer this question. This is the first of such experiments that measures the impact of organic moving walls on an occupant’s performance and experience. We have shown that when a person is placed in a small room both their experience and performance of doing a jigsaw puzzle are increased if the walls appear to move. 90% of subjects performed better when the walls moved. No subjects reported disliking the moving walls and more than not reported feeling more comfortable, and better able to concentrate and do the work. Many reported the feeling of something missing without the moving walls while being calmed when the walls moved.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Clive Melbourne, Rob Aspin and Sunhil Vadera for their advice, the rest of the team at the Centre for Virtual Environments and Future Media (CVEFM) for their help and the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) for their support.

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