Neuroarchitecture

Master’s Thesis

Year: 2022

Project: “Applications of Neuroarchitecture in Indoor Environment Design Using Virtual Reality, EEG, and Machine Learning”

Status: Completed

This project was a part of the master’s thesis which developed a highly interdisciplinary system, combining architecture, virtual reality (VR), cognitive neuroscience and machine learning.This study came out with a sufficient success percentage for healthy people and opened wide doors to start thinking about the next extensions and applications. This study investigated the impact of different colours and patterns on human relaxation and attention in the indoor environment. Mobile EEG was used to measure the different brain activities during walking through a high-realistic virtual reality environment.

Two main brain oscillations were considered as physiological measurements; alpha as an indicator for relaxation and beta for attention and concentration. The study investigated through subjective and objective physiological tools that warm colours can increase our attention but also can decrease our relaxation. However, cold colours positively impact our relaxation in the space. In contrast, complex patterns can reduce our relaxation in space.

Four VR Environments

Group (A)

For group (A) investigated the impact of complex patterns on human perception by presenting two scenes; the first scene without patterns and the second one that contained complex patterns

Group (B)

Machine Learning

Architecture Virtual Reality Neuroscience

Research Area Space Layout

The project required to develop the system is highly interdisciplinary, combining Architecture, Virtual Reality (VR), Cognitive Neuroscience and Machine Learning.

There were four virtual rooms (4 scenes) identical in terms of dimensions (W × L × H: 5.3 × 7.0 × 3.5m), and different in colours and patterns (Stage 3).

Unreal Engine 4.26 was used ti build the VR scence. Four scenes were created and divided as per the targeted design element into two conditions; group (A) investigated the effect of the patterns and group (B) investigated the effect of colours.

For group (B), two scenes were segregated into a scene with blue and green colours as an example of cold colours and another scene with red as an example of warm colours. This condition investigated the impact of these two colours on our perception; relaxation and attention.