This week I had the opportunity to attend an event at the amazing UCL PEARL facility in Dagenham. PEARL (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory) is a state-of-the-art research environment unlike any other. This vast, £50 million facility boasts over 4000 square meters of modifiable space, essentially a giant sandbox for researchers to explore the intricacies of human interaction with the built environment. The event was part of research project led by Hugo Spears in UCL Neuroscience and Fiona Zisch at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Their goal? To create “a ‘CERN for the Mind’ making new discoveries that aid the design of better buildings for human health, learning, and living.”
The experiment involved 100 participants traversing a meticulously crafted 12-room maze, not unlike an art gallery showcasing 12 unique design pieces from the UCL Design for Perfromance & Interaction MArch. But this wasn’t your typical gallery stroll. Here, participants were outfitted with cutting-edge wearable sensors and tracked using a combination of UWB (ultra-wideband) technology, kindly sponsored by our collaborators at Ubisense, and a camera system tracking QR codes embedded in their caps.
The experiment unfolded in three stages. Initially, participants explored the space freely, allowing researchers to observe their natural navigation patterns. The second stage introduced a specific task, prompting participants to navigate around the exhibits, revealing how their mental models of the space adapted. Finally, the researchers tweaked the layout itself, further testing the participants’ cognitive flexibility.
This innovative approach to spatial navigation research has the potential to revolutionize how we design and build the spaces we inhabit. By capturing real-time movement data coupled with physiological indicators of well-being, the project aims to create a comprehensive picture of how people experience and interact with their surroundings.
The data from this kind of experimental observatory has really interesting potential. My mind is already racing around applying the LLM techniques we are exploring for timeseries analysis in our TRUST2 project to map the flows and patterns of how people are moving and codify that to create more intelligent agents for pedestrian simulation.
If you can find an excuse to visit PEARL, take it! It really is lovely research facility.
It also meant I finally played Sea Hero Quest.
Image from https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/
This was the blurb for the event:
“Experience first-hand a pioneering NeuroArchitecture experiment that will transform our understanding of human behaviour. We’ve created a modifiable 12-room maze furnished with a new camera system & wearable sensors to help us track the simultaneous movements of people within it.
Using this capability, the team can recreate, at full scale, the layouts of hospitals, schools, galleries, transport hubs and more, to track and map the simultaneous real-time journeys of 100s of people. Wearable sensors will map indicators of wellbeing onto spatial movement within the environment. Data from this kind of testing can help organisations save time and money, as well as improve the quality of spaces, when they plan for new or refurbished space, test alternative configurations, or evaluate current performance. Further, the results from this work may help form:
- an evidence base for policy affecting development and planning of the built environment
- license-ready data sets for companies based on different common facility types.
We’re very keen to get input on how this initiative in NeuroArchitecture can best support key stakeholders. Ultimately this demonstration launches a ‘CERN for the Mind’ making new discoveries that aid the design of better buildings for human health, learning, and living.
Partners The project is a collaboration between The Bartlett School of Architecture, Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL PEARL, and the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE). UCL PEARL is a £50M East London research laboratory with over 4000 m2 of modifiable space for research. The project has been funded by the UK Government Higher Education Innovation Fund, UCL PEARL, and the Bartlett School of Architecture.”