Virtual reality space in architectural design education: Learning effect of scale feeling

In teaching architectural design, accurately visualizing a space's realistic size through the dimensional figures on the architectural drawings (scale feeling) is considered a crucial design competency. Typically, students learn this through field surveys and measurements of numerous buildings and rooms. However, this process might be time-consuming. Therefore, to expedite the improvement of students' scale feeling, we used virtual reality (VR) instead of real space and verified whether VR training can also develop students' scale feeling and achieve similar training effects as in real space. In this study, we used undergraduate architectural students as subjects and observed the change in verbal responses to the length of some objects before and after training using VR or real space to confirm the learning effect of scale feeling. Consequently, younger students who lacked architectural knowledge demonstrated a 19.4 % (p