Een architecturale benadering tot virtuele realiteit

This thesis is about space — questioning how we move in, design for and live in immersive Virtual Reality (VR). While VR offers virtually limitless space where users, creators and developers can freely shape their own experiences, VR is not a blank canvas devoid of existing context, nor a space without any design constraints: First, VR confronts a locomotion challenge, where free exploration is constrained by the user's inability to walk naturally through virtual environments larger than the physical space available. Second, VR confronts a legibility challenge, where the representation of virtual environments predominately replicates the real world and the creative freedom of VR space remains largely unexplored. To tackle these challenges, we look towards the domain of architectural design, which both masters the design of an embodied, first-person engagement with space and possesses a rich collective memory of lived experience. We draw upon the interactive capabilities unique to VR — such as bending space-time, defying the laws of physics or leveraging perceptual asymmetries — to inform a design language that exploits familiar architectural affordances to engage with unfamiliar yet imaginative representations of VR space. We thus investigate the following overarching research questions: (1) How do architectural affordances shape behaviour and cognitive engagement in VR space? (2) How can interactive possibilities unique to VR space change how architectural design is manifested? (3) How do patterns in architectural features support newly emerging social phenomena in the metaverse? Overall, our research contributes a 'superarchitectural' paradigm of leveraging architectural design principles to rationalise the orchestration of a more personal, phenomenological, and extraordinary way of shaping VR space. To tackle the locomotion challenge, we prototyped and evaluated two novel overt redirection techniques that employ architectural manipulations to facilitate natural walking in constrained physical spaces, empowering users to walk through virtual environments that dynamically fold or move around them. To tackle the legibility challenge, we conducted interactive design sessions with a cohort of architectural experts to critique, redesign and reimagine existing VR spaces in the metaverse. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we synthesised design dimensions for a `superarchitectural' metaverse, where architectural diegesis shapes the spatial narrative, mutability evolves virtual environments over time, and asymmetry reconciles conflicting design tensions. However, acknowledging that changing social phenomena in the metaverse may yet call for new design requirements for VR space, we investigated how and where long-term social VR users engage with metaverse space and identified four social VR typologies unique to the metaverse rather than physical reality. We anticipate that as superarchitectural affordances become more familiar, or as physical architecture adopts characteristics of virtual architecture, the boundaries between what is architectural and what is superarchitectural will continue to shift and reaffirm itself.