This week PEARL hosted a massive neuroarchitecture experiment where we had over one hundred participants navigating around a labyrinth and undertaking some social ecology experiments so that we could explore different people-tracking and brain-monitoring technologies in the context of large numbers of people and complex environments. This is a huge undertaking in neuroscience: to monitor such a large number of people simultaneously in a controlled-yet-real environment has never been done before. For architecture it is very rare to see such a complex environment being tested at scale with such a large number of people being tracked and monitored in such neuronal detail. But for the combination of neuroscience and architecture, this needs a facility that can combine all these technologies, disciplines, philosophies, scales and capabilities to produce a scientifically rigorous and ecologically valid controlled environment that would give such an experiment validity. This is about how we learn about people in their environments. This is PEARL.
People were tracked with a variety of technologies, including optical cameras (hence the snazzy hats), ultra wide band tracking, eye tracking and gait analysis, so that we could compare results from the different technologies, and, more importantly, how different technologies work together to deliver a much richer synthesis of data that enables us to understand better what is actually happening when people visit places with multiple points of interest, a variety of pathways and interactions with other people. We were not only interested in just the hard issues of tracking and monitoring people, we were also sensing their social interactions. So we checked out a variety of different brain sensing technologies at the same time. The results will of course take time to analyse.
But then the day job of PEARL continues. Creating such an environment takes time, many skills, imagination and creativity. PEARL was designed to be able to house worlds. So as soon as the neuroarchitecture experiment finished, the labyrinth was disassembled and preparations commenced to create the next few worlds for our next experiments. You can see the mock-up London Underground Central Line train in the background in the picture below. This is for a project which is part of our programme to study the cognitive load, stress effects and positional activity of people in crowded and uncrowded trains. This will involve neurological, physiological and physical measurements of people as they conduct journeys in the train under different crowding conditions.
Before those experiments happen though, we will be creating a series of giant immersive multisensorial mulitdimensional environments for a workshop to encourage a design team to inspire and encourage learning about how to think out of the box in creating their work in the infrastructure engineering world. After that we will be working with over 100 artists on the processes of creating multisensorial environments for exhibiting and presenting different artworks and the implications of different uses of light, smell and sound in achieving the best communications between artist and audience. Then, for an overseas Government, we will construct a long mixed-mode infrastructure so that we can look at how cyclists and micromobility technology users interact with each other and how infrastructure may need to be adapted to allow these interactions to happen safely and without incurring anxiety or high stress levels. Later we will be looking at the psychological impacts on people exposed to high levels of noise in the London Underground system. Oh and then there is the continuing work with our Japanese collaborators on interactions between e-scooter riders and pedestrians...
So although this week's neuroarchitecture was a fantastic world-first in building cognitive understanding of how people function in environments at a large scale, it was actually just another day in the wonderful worlds and times of PEARL!
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