UC Berkeley’s XR Lab launched a virtual reality project allowing College of Environmental Design, or CED, students and faculty to showcase their work and explore Bauer Wurster Hall remotely.
According to campus architecture professor and XR Lab director Luisa Caldas, Virtual Bauer Wurster was launched in June to help CED students deal with isolation during the pandemic.
“Architecture is a very specific learning environment,” Caldas said. “There’s a lot of what we call lateral learning, or peer learning … and how we could recapture that was a big concern.”
According to Caldas, at the start of the pandemic, there were no digital platforms that could truly replicate the studio environment, so XR Lab created Virtual Bauer Wurster with accessibility in mind. Though currently only available to master of architecture students, the space uses 2D in virtual reality to create an immersive environment that can be accessed by anyone with a computer, Caldas said.
Caldas added that while Virtual Bauer Wurster was created to rebuild the “community of personal relations” that is lost in remote learning, many architecture students rely on 3D models, which are difficult to work with remotely. XR Lab’s solution was to create a virtual studio environment where students can upload their drawings and 3D model projects and interact with others.
Jeff Schaefer, a campus master of architecture student, said he was initially skeptical about the role of virtual reality in architecture but has since changed his mind and is excited to see what it does for education.
“When you design a building in real life, there’s kind of a moment when it becomes real,” Schaefer said. “It stops being your creation in a way. People can interact with it on their own and form their own ideas about it … Virtual Wurster lets you take that step without having to have a building be built.”
Schaefer added that getting to interact with other people’s work in ways that are not possible in normal design presentations has been a “really inspiring” experience.
For Emiel Cockx, another campus master of architecture student, having the ability to walk inside a virtual 3D model rather than just looking into a “tiny” physical model is a “game-changer” that has changed the way he thinks about design.
“With those virtual models, that is way closer to what architecture is in the end really about,” Cockx said. “That’s the exciting part; it allows you to experience designs that don’t exist yet.”
Cockx added, however, that there are nuances of the studio environment that Virtual Bauer Wurster does not yet capture, such as the ability to have conversations with people face-to-face and to make changes to physical models in real time.
Marcel Sanchez Prieto, campus associate professor of architecture, said Virtual Bauer Wurster has created a way to resemble the studio environment, which allows for the “cross-pollination” of information. He also noted virtual reality’s potential as a tool of teaching.
“(Virtual reality) will be very important so students learn what it really feels like to be in their designs, what they’re really imagining,” Sanchez Prieto said. “And that’s a new source of understanding and measuring.”
