Does Virtual Reality Allow Essay Participants Better Conditions to Get Information Regarding the Perception of Architectural Contexts?

This article integrates a research project that aims to understand the architectonic contexts’ influence on meditation practice. One of the phases of the project refers to meditation practitioners’ emotional reactions to a set of architectonic contexts using Kansei. Accordingly, we will use the Kansei inquiry method which allows the creation of predictive models that relate characteristics of architectonic contexts with the expected reactions of meditation practitioners. The more productive type of approach, real scale models, might be unpractical due to the high costs of implementation. The aim of this article is first to establish a conviction about which of the two ways of presenting models might be better for getting this information. Under these two conditions, 30 participants who practice meditation, 15 with PowerPoint (PP) and 15 with virtual reality (VR), classified 10 architectonic contexts on how they may be influencing their will to practice meditation. These 10 contexts vary in materiality and openings to the exterior. The Kansei word pairs (agitated-calm, distracted-aware, absent-present, uncomfortable-comfortable, numb-awake, unstable-stable, depressed-happy, and constrained-free) were used to evaluate the participant's perception. At the end, the volunteers were interviewed to collect information about their grade of Presence. The results showed higher punctuation attributed to VR in almost all questions of the Presence Evaluation Questionnaire (PEQ), this might suggest a higher immersion grade in VR than with the PP. Moreover, the Kansei results for mandala windows suggest that a glare effect is only clearly perceived in VR. Finally, we recommend further studies with larger samples.