The real world was brought into the laboratory on a scale never seen before, for an experiment where over 100 people were tracked walking through a custom-built network of moveable 'walls', in a UCL-led research project investigating how people move through spaces.
The project attracted participation from professionals in architecture, hospitals, transport, AI, property, video game design, dance, and museums.
The research team, led by academics from neuroscience, architecture, and civil engineering, are seeking to develop comprehensive data about how people navigate and experience spaces, that could aid the design of better buildings to improve health, learning, and living.
At a launch event and live experiment, over 100 people wearing a range of sensors walked through a maze-like environment, set up as an art gallery at UCL's PEARL (Person Environment Activity Research Laboratory) facility, a unique space in East London created to explore how people interact with their environment.
The research project is set up to bridge the gap between tightly controlled lab experiments and field-based experiments with uncontrolled variables. The academics are hoping their findings, over the course of numerous experiments, will yield valuable insights for designing spaces such as transport hubs, hospitals, or offices, including making them more inclusive, while also informing AI and simulation software.
Lead researcher Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Experimental Psychology) said: "To study how people navigate their environments and how their brains support this, we can do that in a research lab - but that's not very realistic - or we can do that in the real world - but that's harder to control or modify. Here, we are bringing the real world into the lab, in a massive space that could be set up as anything from a train station to a hospital or school, to facilitate research."
Co-lead researcher Dr Fiona Zisch (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture) said: "When designing buildings and other spaces, you need to understand how people will move around the space, which can be surprisingly difficult in practice. Many spaces leave visitors lost, confused, or stressed, or lack accessibility for people with different mobility levels, health issues, or neurodiversity.
"If people cannot easily navigate a space, this can affect care outcomes in hospitals, efficiency in transport or logistics, or safety, particularly in the case of emergency evacuation, so it's vital that we do more research to understand diverse requirements to make design more equitable."
The study space, measuring 15 metres squared, has eight-metre-high curtains, acting as moveable 'walls', and was designed by the lead researchers alongside Professors Stephen Gage and Sean Hanna (both UCL Bartlett School of Architecture), to see how changes to the space alter how people move within it.
In the initial setup, the 'art gallery' includes projects on display from UCL Design for Performance and Interaction MArch students, that study participants perused at their own pace while wearing a cap containing a tracking device and a barcode for camera tracking, with the latter developed by George Profenza and Jessica In (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture). Some participants wore additional monitoring devices, such as mobile electroencephalography (EEG) systems to measure brain activity, made possible by Professor Klaus Gramann (Technische Universität Berlin). During the experiment, participants were given instructions at different points to complete tasks such as finding specific displays, congregating in groups, or evacuating the space.
