“Isn’t PEARL just a fancy way of doing what we are doing already?” One of the things that has stood out to me during 2024 is that this question has been asked less often than in previous years. Everybody who has visited PEARL since we took over the building in 2021 has been shocked and amazed about what we can do in PEARL. Not everyone has picked up the other part of that observation: “… and what could PEARL do for us?”.
To be fair, this is not surprising. PEARL is very different from any other research facility in the world. Others might have large spaces, they might have a comprehensive lighting system, they might have smart sound and acoustics systems. One or two might have a smell system, and maybe someone else has a configurable floor. Others might have mobile brain scanners, person-tracking or an array of physiological and physical measurement systems. None has all of these at the same sort of scale as we have in PEARL. But our visitors can imagine using some at least of these to support them, so why have they not crossed the bridge into asking that unasked question?
The quick and superficial answer is that they have been astonished by the scale and breadth of what is on offer and are simply not used to thinking in detail at that scale. “Can you build a station?” Of course, but what do you want to do with it: what do you want to find out? “Can you prove our navigation algorithm?” Yes we can do that – but what do you want to find out? “Can you create a giant model of a brain?” Yes, but what do you want to represent in it? “Can you create a novel performance space?” Yes we can, but what are you really looking for that you can’t do in an existing one? These questions are challenging for the people who have experienced PEARL, but they are much harder for their colleagues who haven’t – especially those charged with responsibility for the finances. Inevitably the response turns into “Why would we build a station in a laboratory when we can use one of our own?”. A perfectly reasonable question to ask. And there is an answer, but it isn’t quick or superficial.
Partly because we have learnt more, partly because we are becoming better at explaining it, and partly because the people coming to visit us are developing their own thinking, this kind of dialogue has started to show signs of changing this year.
PEARL is a bit deceptive. It looks very simple: it’s a big space. But inside that big space we can study the way the brain engages with the environment around it so that we can understand how the person responds to the situation they are facing. By being able to work out how the brain is stimulated by the environments it encounters, we can compose the most appropriate level of detail in substantive environments so that we can create the illusions that stimulate the brain into thinking it is in the real situation we are studying. This could be a street, a bus stop, a train, a park, a supermarket, or whatever. The key is for us to understand what the brain is responding to in the environment, and to make sure that this is within the environment we are presenting it with.
So, you need a train to be moving? What tells our brains that the train is moving? Sound? Vibration? Images? Touch? The combination of all these? What can we tell from such data? Well, it means that we can study how, for example, changing the sound profile or the lighting might alter thermal comfort, or the way passengers prepare to leave the train. In other words, we can explore, not just the usual physical characteristics of the environment with people, but also how human brains respond to them. And we have a variety of methods, approaches and techniques to help us in this new approach. This changes the way we can interpret, understand and model responses, and thus what we should include in a design to obtain the best passenger performance and reaction. It means you can start to design public spaces from inside the brain outwards, instead of basing designs on observations of just the overt physical reactions of people in existing environments.
Recent examples at PEARL have involved crowds, where we have been able to track in detail large numbers (>100) of participants in detail navigating around a maze, including an evacuation process, and including, dynamic real-time position, locomotion, skeletal monitoring, and brain monitoring. We did this to demonstrate some of our capabilities to a particular group of industries. However, that evacuation procedure seems to have broken all the prediction rules derived from the conventional evacuation models. We need to work more on the data, but there is the unswerving question “why did only 60% of the participants leave by the signed exit route and the other 40% by another route?”. We have some ideas about this, but for now the point is that you can only see that detail if you are scanning brains and locating people en masse under controlled conditions, and, because we can do that, this is the kind of question that PEARL can help to answer. The thing is that nobody has been able to ask it before.
So, is the problem you are facing with people in a public space one that you have been having for some time? Is it a problem that is resisting your attentions? Is it the result of you having done the usual in the past, but is seemingly intractable? Is it in the “too hard” box? Whatever your industry, if you are dealing with person-environment interactions, and whether it is transport, healthcare, performing arts, crime prevention, crowd management, exhibition or museum management or some other example, PEARL can help you come afresh to the challenge, with new eyes (ears, noses, skin, brain …).
As I said at the beginning of this piece, I have noticed during 2024 that some people are beginning to open their questions to this sort of review. We have had questions like: “instead of setting a new standard, what about thinking about what the standard has to deliver, and how people respond to that?” or “How can we move people around a transport terminal in a better, more comfortable and less frustrating way?”, or “can we design infrastructure that is less scary for people?”, or “can we determine how comfortable people might be under different environmental conditions?”. But inevitably there are many more questions that could be asked.
What might you think of asking us in 2025?
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