Embodied Virtual Reality: The Impacts of Human-Nature Connection During Engineering Design

The engineering design process can underutilize nature-based solutions during infrastructure development. Instances of nature within the built environment are reflections of the human-nature connection, which may alter how designers ideate solutions to a given design task, especially through virtual reality (VR) as an embodied perspective taking platform. Embodied VR helps designers "see" as an end-user sees, inclusive of the natural environment through the uptake of an avatar, such as a bird or fish. Embodied VR emits empathy toward the avatar, e.g., to see as a bird in VR, one tends to feel and think as a bird. Furthermore, embodied VR also impacts altruistic behavior toward the environment, specifically through proenvironmental behaviors. However, limited research discovers the impact of embodied VR on the human-nature connection and if embodied VR has any impact on how designers ideate, specifically surrounding nature-based solutions as a form of a proenvironmental behavior during the design process. This research first presents a formal measurement of embodied VR's impact on the human-nature connection and maps this impact toward design-related proenvironmental behaviors through design ideas, i. e., tracking changes in nature-based design choices. The design study consisted of three groups of engineering undergraduate students which were given a case study and plan review: a VR group embodying a bird (n=35), a self-lens VR group (n=34), and a control group (n=33). The case study was about a federal mandate to minimize combined sewer overflow in a neighborhood within Cincinnati, OH. Following the plan review, VR groups were given a VR walkthrough or flythrough of the case study area of interest as a selected avatar (embodied:bird, self-lens:oneself). Participants were tested for their connectedness to nature and a mock-design charrette was held to measure engineering design ideas. Verbal protocol analysis was followed, instructing participants to think aloud. Design ideation sessions were recorded and manually transcribed. The results of the study indicated that embodiment impacts the human-nature connection based on participants' perceived connection to nature. Only the bird group witnessed an increase in connectedness to nature, whereas the self-lens and control groups did not report any change. This change in connectedness to nature was also confirmed by engineering design ideas. The bird group was more likely to ideate green-thinking designs to solve the stormwater issue and benefit both nature and socioeconomic conditions, whereas the control group mostly discussed gray designs as the catalyst for minimizing combined sewer overflows. The self-lens group also mentioned green design ideas as well as socioeconomic change, but mostly placed the beneficiary of the design toward people rather than nature in the bird group. The mode of analysis for these findings was driven by thematic content analysis, an exploration of design space as a function of semantic distance, and large language models (LLMs) to synthesize design ideas and themes. An LLM's performance lent accuracy to the design ideas in comparison to thematic content analysis, but struggled to cross-compare groups to provide generalizable findings. This research is intended to benefit the engineering design process with a) the benefit of perspective-taking on design ideas based on lenses of embodied VR and b) various methods to supplement thematic content analysis for coding design ideas.