Virtual Reality and Computational Design

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has been used for diverse purposes, including medical surgery training, visualizing metabolic pathways, socio psychological experiments, flight and driving simulation, as well as industrial and architectural design [1-5]. In these applications the role of VR is to represent objects for visual experience by a human expert. In engineering and design applications the purpose is to verify the performance of a design object with respect to the criteria involved in the task during a search for superior solutions. In computational design, where this verification and search process are performed by means of computation, the instantiation of objects in virtual reality may become a necessary feature. The necessity occurs when the verification process requires the presence of ‘physical’ object attributes beyond the parameters that are subject to identification through search. For example, in an architectural design the goal may be to determine the most suitable position of an object, while the suitability is verified based on visual perception characteristics of the object. That is, the verification requires the presence of object features beyond the object’s location in order to exercise the evaluation of the object’s performance regarding the perception-based requirements. These features are provided when the object is instantiated in VR. This way a measurement process driving the evaluation, such as a virtual perception process in the form of a stochastic sampling process, can be executed to assess the perceptual properties of the object concerned. This paper elucidates the role of VR in computational design by means of two applications, where VR is a necessary feature for the effectiveness of the applications. The applications concern a computational design system implemented in VR that identifies suitable solutions to design problems. The effectiveness of the system has been established in previous work [6], while the general significance of the role that VR plays in the system has not been addressed. This will be accomplished in this paper, which is organized as follows. In section two the computational system is described. In section three the role that VR is playing in the system is described and demonstrated with two applications from the domain of architectural design. This is followed by conclusions.