Evaluating Cognitive Load and Sense of Presence in Design Review of Healthcare Facility Design: 2D Versus Immersive VR

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Failure to identify design issues early on can have significant impact on construction project costs, and more importantly building occupants’ ability to perform their daily work tasks in the finished building design. The common use of 2D drawings during design review results in building occupants and other end-users having difficulties mentally visualizing the final building design and are thereby prevented from making accurate interpretations of the drawings. However, immersive Virtual Reality (VR) has recently shown to help address this problem by allowing stakeholders to “step into” the virtual environment of the building design. Still, there is a lack of systematic research studying the benefits of VR compared to 2D drawings in the context of design review in real-life projects. The present study addresses this gap by investigating both cognitive processing and sense of presence. Data was gathered from three different healthcare facility design projects, where end-users (e.g., building occupants, facility planners) first did design review with 2D drawings and then switched to VR to continue the design review. The results show that cognitive load to be lower when using VR compared to 2D drawings as well as identifying a negative correlation between sense of presence and cognitive load among end-users in VR. All in all, the results of the study highlight the usefulness of VR during design review.