Spacemaker VR is an Oculus-based virtual reality system that allows designers to walk through their designs
Source: Digital Physical

The physical spaces we inhabit have a direct influence on how we feel, think and behave. Understanding this implicit dialogue between built environments and our minds continues to open new ways for architects to design physical spaces that better meet people’s needs. Neuro-architecture, interactive architecture, intelligent environments and virtual reality technology are among those exciting and partially overlapping disciplines that are currently on the frontline of the ongoing architectural revolution.

Neuro-architecture

Where previously architects had to count on purely anecdotal and intuitive principles, neuro-architecture is now promising to provide a truly evidence-based neurobiological rationale for designing architectural spaces, be it your office, school or hospital. This is achieved thanks to a variety of techniques that allow researchers to quantify and measure human responses to different components that constitute a particular architectural environment, including by measuring the relevant regions of the brain.

Understanding the precise effects of each component on our mental and physical health is difficult to overestimate. Imagine being able to design classrooms whose very architectural configuration aids students’ concentration and improves learning or hospitals that accelerate patients’ recovery. The research can be carried out on existing buildings, models or in virtual reality simulations, before the actual structures are even built.

Virtual reality, in fact, can be extremely helpful when it comes to neuro-architecture research for several reasons. It allows to set up virtual environments where participants can navigate in life-like conditions, while at the same time researchers can have a systematic control of the introduced stimuli. Importantly, the response can be measured on different scales starting from an entire building to the scale of a room to a single architectural feature such as the height of the ceiling or the amount and quality of light allowed into the space. Some interesting research in this direction was conducted by the professor Eve Edelstein with the use of the virtual reality platform CAVE.

Those who think that the CAVE and other virtual reality rooms are not immersive enough, think, for instance, of the possibilities opened up by the much-talked-about Oculus headset. Contrary to virtual reality rooms, which are not easily accessible to everyone, virtual reality headsets are potentially available to every designer. Instead of fiddling around with physical prototypes, designers could now walk through their own creations and actually experience them. Spacemaker VR from Digital Physical is one example of how this technology can be used for the benefit of architects.

Read our previous post to learn about the eXperience Induction Machine, another exciting application of virtual reality.

Interactive architecture and intelligent environments:

The two terms are often interchangeable in many contexts, perhaps with a slightly more artistic connotation for the former and a more functional one for the latter. Whatever the difference between them, both are guided by the increasing penetration of computing into our daily lives to develop dynamic environments that can adapt their physical properties to the behaviour of the inhabitants. The ultimate goal, of course, is make people feel more at home and in harmony with their physical surroundings.

Many of the examples of interactive architecture are born from a mixture of artistic thinking and computational engineering. So far the researchers have been toying with some of the most fundamental parameters that are known to alter our state of mind. Unsurprisingly, light is one of the favorites when it comes to interactive architecture. Check out the two examples below, which include the Synthetic Oracle (former Hello Stranger) from the SPECS group at Pompeu Fabra University and BIOSTAGOG developed jointly by Platige Image and Bridge.

We live in a time when the scale of scientific research is undergoing an unprecedented exponential growth, which contributes to the generation of equally unprecedented amounts of data. Disciplines like neuroscience, astronomy or particle physics are piling up so much information that finding and implementing new ways of representing, navigating and manipulating this information is rapidly becoming a pressing necessity.

One specifically promising method relies on the use of virtual and mixed reality platforms. What could be more intuitive and useful for, say, a neuroscientist trying to make sense of a huge and seemingly chaotic brain data set than an ability to fly through its virtual gesture-controlled representation and actually experience the properties of data in search for meaningful patterns.

The eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), built in the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, is one example of such immersive spaces, which is currently applied to work precisely with data collected from the human brain. XIM allows researchers to visualize a brain connectome, the network of nodes and connections that defines what is going on in our vital organ. XIM is now a key part of the Collective Experience of Emphatic Data Systems (CEEDs), a European project seeking to develop a whole set of tools to bring big data visualisation to a new level.

XIM can be hooked up to a series of sensors that measure such parameters as the user’s heart rate, skin conductance, eye gaze and brain activity. This allows the system to register certain subconscious patterns, associated with how we perceive and process information, and guide the user’s attention to areas of potential interest that would otherwise remain unnoticed. This feature, along with XIM’s increased interactivity, is what really makes XIM stand out in comparison with some other state-of-the-art virtual and mixed reality systems such as the AlloSphere at the California Nanosystems Institute or the CAVE2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Earlier this month, SPECS and CEEDs showcased their platform for embodied exploration of neural data at the 16^th edition of Laval Virtual, the largest virtual technology conference in Europe. You can see a complete photo report from the event HERE.

Running this year from September 2nd to September 13th, BCBT will provide students with the unique opportunity to attend lectures by prominent scientists in the fields of cognitive science and technology, as well participate in hands-on tutorials while working towards their own final project.

BCBT is organized and supported by the European project CSN (Convergent Science Network of Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems) and this year is also supported by Goal Leaders (biologically-constrained architectures for the next generation of adaptive robots). You can find out more about the previous editions of BCBT HERE.

Don’t miss your chance to sign up now — see you there!

The Spanish Society of Neuroscience, has declared 2012 Neuroscience Year in Spain. The year-long celebration serves as a way to bring neuroscience to the public and promote the dissemination of scientific knowledge ; a series of exhibitions, conferences, and a variety of other events have been taking place around the country throughout the year.

Here’s a taste of what was featured last month at the Fabra y Coats creation space in Barcelona, Spain– members of the Synthetic Perceptive Emotive and Cognitive Systems Lab (SPECS)  from Universitat Pompeu Fabra  displayed some of their latest innovations and talked about their recent work:

Trying out the RGS

Later on, Armin Duff talked about plasticity and the brain  followed by Belén Rubio Ballester who explained how the Rehabilitation Gaming System (RGS) is used with stroke patients.  Visitors were busy trying it out all day!

Interactive 3D brain imaging

The ¨emotion machine¨caught the eye of many passers by: Sylvain Legroux and Fabio Rotondi were present to help participants experience personalized multimedia through a multimodal system that can detect responses from physiological and behavioral measures while being linked to musical instruments and  a real-time graphics system called SMuSe composition.

Fotios Balampanis with a flying robot

Of course, few SPECS demos would be complete without robots! A chemical sensing robot roamed around the ground while a flying saucer-like bot took visitors by surprise as it hovered in mid air.

The evening session drew a large crowd, featuring talks by leading scientists in the field, Paul Verschure, director of the SPECS Lab at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra  and Robert Zatorre, director of the The Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Paul Vershure, director of the SPECS lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

The audience was given an idea of how long musical instruments have been a part of human culture when they were shown a collection of 35,000 year old flutes fashioned out of vulture bones.

Robert Zatorre discussed some of the effects that Music has on the human brain… does it act somewhat like a drug? And, why does it make us want to dance?  Paul Verschure then lead the audience to ponder the concept of creating music without instruments… music created directly through our brains.

To find out about more  activities and events related to the year of Neuroscience in Spain click HERE