PORTFOLIO
Echo
PhD Dissertation Stage 1 (on-going)
Echo is an ongoing VR research project investigating how contextual cues within virtual environments influence user engagement and psychological experience.
The project uses a reconstructed 1980s domestic environment as an experimental setting to examine how objects, furniture, materials, lighting, media, and culturally specific details contribute to the experience of a virtual place. Rather than treating these elements as decorative background, Echo examines them as design variables that may shape how users explore, interpret, feel, and engage with an immersive environment.
The long-term goal is to develop reusable and generalizable design knowledge about the role of contextual environmental cues in VR.
1. Motivation
Virtual environments are often designed as containers for interactions, tasks, or narratives, while the environment itself is rarely treated as the primary object of study. Objects, furniture, lighting, materials, and decorative details are routinely included in VR experiences, but their effects are often bundled together, described only as visual content, or left unexamined.
This makes it difficult to determine whether contextual richness meaningfully influences user experience, which cues matter, and how much environmental information is beneficial. Echo addresses this gap by treating contextual cues as controlled design variables rather than as background decoration.
By systematically varying the amount and richness of contextual information across comparable virtual environments, the project aims to examine how environmental design influences engagement, psychological response, and potentially cognitive activity.
2. Framework: Environmental Cues
Virtual environments are often experienced as coherent wholes, yet the information they contain is not homogeneous. Different features communicate structure, atmosphere, meaning, and social presence in distinct ways. To make these features more analytically and operationally tractable, this project draws from three disciplinary perspectives: environmental psychology, architectural theory, and cognitive neuroscience.
Environmental Psychology
Environmental psychology distinguishes features of the built environment according to their stability and communicative function. Rapoport describes environments through three layers:
Fixed-feature elements, such as layout, scale, and boundaries
Semi-fixed feature elements, such as furniture, objects, and decorative items
Non-fixed feature elements, such as people, behavior, and social signals
This perspective is useful because it treats environmental features not simply as physical components, but as elements through which environments communicate meaning.
Architectural Theory
Architectural theory offers a parallel account of how environments are experienced. Norberg-Schulz describes the built environment through:
Space, referring to structural and configurational properties
Character, referring to the atmosphere created through materials, light, objects, and sensory qualities
Spirit of place, referring to the meaning, identity, and sense of belonging that emerge through human experience
This perspective emphasizes that environments are not defined only by geometry. Their character and meaning also emerge from the objects, materials, sensory qualities, and cultural references that make a place recognizable.
Cognitive Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience provides a complementary perspective on how environmental information is processed. Research has identified specialized responses to spatial scenes, discrete objects, and social agents. However, these forms of information are not processed as entirely separate systems. Contemporary network neuroscience instead understands cognition as emerging through dynamic coordination among distributed brain networks.
This means that spatial, contextual, and social information can be distinguished for analysis, even though users experience them together as an integrated environment.
An Integrated Framework:
Bringing these perspectives together, the framework distinguishes three categories of environmental cues:
Spatial Cues
Structural and configurational properties of the environment, including layout, scale, boundaries, visibility, and navigational affordances.
Spatial cues establish what movement and action are possible and provide the stable structure within which the experience unfolds.
Contextual Cues
Movable, modifiable, and sensory features that establish the atmosphere and meaning of a setting, including furniture, objects, artifacts, materials, lighting, media, decorative elements, and culturally or historically specific details.
Contextual cues may influence experience in several ways. Familiar objects can activate memories of previous encounters; materials and lighting can shape the affective tone of a space; and culturally meaningful artifacts can communicate identity, history, and social context.
Social Cues
Features that communicate the presence, identity, behavior, and activity of other people, including avatars, NPCs, interpersonal interactions, traces of human activity, and other socially meaningful signals.
Social cues help users interpret who occupies a place, how they are expected to behave, and what kinds of relationships or activities the environment supports.
These categories are intended as analytical tools rather than rigid divisions. Virtual environments are experienced holistically, but distinguishing their layers makes it possible to systematically examine how particular design decisions shape cognition, emotion, and behavior.
3. Study Concept and Research Questions
The planned study will compare multiple versions of the same virtual environment while holding spatial layout, interaction mechanics, and core tasks constant. Each condition will contain a different level of contextual cue richness:
Minimal contextual cues
A visually sparse environment containing only the elements necessary for basic recognition and interaction.
Moderate contextual cues
An environment containing coherent furniture, materials, lighting, and selected objects that establish a recognizable domestic context.
Rich contextual cues
A highly detailed environment containing layered objects, media, artifacts, decorative elements, and historically specific information that communicates a distinct time, place, and lived history.
By varying contextual cues while controlling the underlying space and interactions, the study will examine whether environmental richness changes how users engage with and respond to the experience.
RQ1. How does the richness of contextual cues influence users’ overall engagement with a virtual environment?
RQ2. How does contextual cue richness affect users’ psychological responses to a virtual place?
RQ3. How does contextual richness influence users’ exploratory behavior, including the amount of time they spend in the environment and the elements they choose to attend to or interact with?
Exploratory RQ. Does contextual cue richness influence attention, memory, or other aspects of cognitive processing within the virtual environment?
4. Experience Design
Why 1980s Home?
A 1980s domestic environment provides a useful testbed for contextual cue research because its identity depends heavily on semi-fixed environmental features. Furniture, appliances, printed media, television content, decorative styles, materials, and everyday household objects collectively communicate the setting’s historical and cultural context.
The same spatial structure can therefore be presented with different degrees of contextual richness, ranging from a minimally furnished interior to a detailed and historically coherent lived-in home. This makes it possible to examine how environmental meaning emerges through the accumulation and organization of contextual cues.
What are Picked?
To establish the spatial foundation of the experience, a Colonial-style house, which is a residential type commonly found across New England, was selected and reconstructed in VR using publicly available architectural floor plans as references.
The reconstruction considered not only the dimensions, layout, and intended functions of the rooms, but also how a middle-class New England home might have been furnished and decorated during the 1980s. Drawing on research and conversations with people familiar with the period, we incorporated recognizable interior features such as wood-paneled walls, patterned wallpaper, shag carpeting, period-appropriate furniture, household appliances, and everyday decorative objects.
Together, these elements were used to transform the architectural shell into a historically and culturally situated domestic environment. These details function as contextual cues rather than purely decorative assets, collectively communicating the home’s time period, regional identity, socioeconomic context, and signs of everyday domestic life.
Current Status
Echo is currently in development. The 1980s domestic environment and its core visual language are being constructed in Unity, while the experimental manipulation and evaluation framework are still being refined.
Current work focuses on defining contextual cue richness, identifying which environmental dimensions should remain controlled across conditions, and selecting measures of subjective engagement, exploratory behavior, and psychological response. Cognitive outcomes remain exploratory and will be specified as the study design develops.