What Virtual Reality Teaches Us About Home
Our interactions with home are intimate, sustained, complex, and even physiological. We react to them not just with our rational mind, and our emotions, but also with our bodies. To make matters more complicated, homes speak to socioeconomic status, and so are subject to a long list of expectations. In perhaps no other space do so many currents of our lives intersect and compete so directly.
What if there was a way to quantify our physiological reaction to the space we occupy? What would we discover about ourselves? That is exactly what my colleagues and I set out to do at my laboratory at the University of Waterloo, where we study physiological and emotional responses to simulated places. What we found is a strong, intrinsic, and consistent biological preference for a particular kind of space—and a consistent betrayal of this preference in final home-purchasing decisions. This betrayal shows that we bring to the spaces we live in, not just our selves, but our memories and expectations.
