I'm going to treat myself by spending the last couple of hours of my official work week looking at some data on home design and psychology. In the RELIVE, we've been doing some really fun experiments in which people are presented with high quality immersive visualizations of a set of residential houses. They can look, move, wander and explore. All we ask is that they let us watch, measure, and ask them questions. We're finding out that people really like well-connected spaces and that the appearance, lighting, colours and textures of the spaces make a difference to how they feel. To give you some idea of how things look to our participants, here's a video of a virtual walk through one of our house models.
Remember that what our participants see is a full-scale immersive view with stereo-depth and nice wide fields of view -- not much like looking at the house on a monitor. In fact, one of our participants, a real estate agent friend of mine, told me that she felt so "immersed" in the house that she could feel the warmth of the sun streaming through the windows onto her arms.
We're really lucky to have captured the interest of one of the most amazing residential architects and cultural critics working today: Sarah Susanka. With her series of "Not So Big" books, she's working hard to help people understand that what makes us happy in our homes is not the number of bathrooms or the square footage of the grand foyer but other subtler, simpler and often much less expensive features. It's a matter of understanding yourself, understanding how space works, and putting the two together. It isn't necessarily easy to do, but making your house into a home is a key ingredient in the quest for a more fulfilling life. Here's a video of Sarah from her appearance on the Charlie Rose show.
The world is getting more crowded. We need to live closer together and closer to the things we need. It's more important than ever that we understand how to make space work for us.
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