Virtual reality space in architectural design education: Learning effect of scale feeling

Abstract

In teaching architectural design, accurately visualizing a space's realistic size through the dimensional figures on the architectural drawings (scale feeling) is considered a crucial design competency. Typically, students learn this through field surveys and measurements of numerous buildings and rooms. However, this process might be time-consuming. Therefore, to expedite the improvement of students' scale feeling, we used virtual reality (VR) instead of real space and verified whether VR training can also develop students' scale feeling and achieve similar training effects as in real space. In this study, we used undergraduate architectural students as subjects and observed the change in verbal responses to the length of some objects before and after training using VR or real space to confirm the learning effect of scale feeling. Consequently, younger students who lacked architectural knowledge demonstrated a 19.4 % (p < 0.01) decrease in inaccuracy after VR training and a 31.4 % (p < 0.01) decrease in real space, while older students demonstrated a small decrease: 8.2 % (p < 0.1) with VR and 3.1 % (n.s.) with real space. No significant difference occurred between students trained in VR and real space. In summary, we conclude that utilizing VR in architecture education can improve students' scale feelings to a similar extent as in real space. When VR space is used for teaching scale feeling, the focus should be on students without architectural knowledge, which is more meaningful than teaching those with architectural knowledge. This study provides theoretical support for the researcher's further use of VR as a tool in teaching architectural design.