Atmospheres of Immersion: Designing and Experiencing in Architecture and Virtual Reality

• Autor(a) principal: Guilherme Nunes de Vasconcelos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/38860; https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-4066-6061
• topic: Immersion; Virtual reality; Architectural design; Atmosphere; Cognition; Experience

This research investigates the production and experience of immersion in architecture and virtual reality (VR), aiming to disclose VR’s cognitive effects and to understand why architects still underuse it for designing. Assuming that cognition is not restricted to a subject’s brain, this study adopts an enactivist perspective on cognition, implying that it extends through the entire organism, including its sensorimotor coupling with the environment. Immersion is approached from a phenomenological standpoint, prioritizing, whenever possible, the author’s first-hand experiences. Some theoretical aspects that emerged were investigated through practice, whether experiencing third-party immersive experiences or producing the two ‘practice studies’ developed for this thesis. The concepts of technology and immersion were studied to evaluate the pertinence of the term ‘immersive technologies’ and to ground theoretically the possibility of an ‘art of immersion’. Immersion in architecture and VR is analysed, arriving at the concept of atmosphere as a possible common ground between experiences. The notion of representation, in its turn, guides the discussion on the production of architecture. The relationship between body and architectural representation is also investigated, disclosing how efficiency became increasingly the standard, which implied the reduction of subjective aspects and the disengagement of the body in designing. The findings show that the software available for developing VR immersive experiences are either too complex, demanding the development of skills that are not usually part of the architects’ domain, or too limited, restricting experimentation. The analysis of the perception of immersion and atmosphere disclosed some subjective aspects related to the instrumentalizing of architects’ imagination, which hinders the perception of alternative uses of VR. Finally, it is argued that the most significant potential of VR for architects is related to the unlikely atmospheres it can bring to presence, allowing architects to experience and be affected by spatialities that are not only a digital reproduction of the look and/or behaviour of a physical environment.