Students beginning landscape design often study projects through photographs found on Pinterest, award websites, and landscape architecture publications. While they are still developing a sense of scale and learning to connect two-dimensional images with three-dimensional space, it can be difficult to judge how large a place is or how its parts fit together. Opportunities to visit these projects in person are often limited. LENS provides immersive 360° views to help students study them from an eye-level position within the space.
Published photographs tend to focus on selected views: a carefully chosen angle, a distinctive form, or a particularly successful part of a project. These images can leave students with only a partial understanding of the layout, the sequence of spaces, and the relationships between foreground, middle ground, and background.
The available documentation also varies considerably. Projects with award coverage or a well-maintained website may have a substantial set of images and drawings. Others may be represented online by just one or two photographs, leaving much of the space difficult to study.
Students already have everyday experience of judging their surroundings in relation to their bodies: how far away a wall feels, how high a tree canopy appears, or how much room there is around a seat. Viewing a landscape at eye level in a headset gives them a familiar starting point for considering its dimensions, proportions, and degree of enclosure.
A 360° recording lets students turn to look around from the capture position and examine how elements relate across the surrounding view. Where several viewpoints are available, they can also consider how these relationships change from one part of the project to another. Reading these views alongside plans and photographs can help students connect the layout of a landscape with the space they perceive within it.
LENS can support introductory studio exercises and precedent study. The following activities connect observation in VR with drawing, dimension estimates, and discussion of design decisions.
Ask students to translate what they observe in VR into a plan, section, or perspective. They can return to the recording as they draw, checking the positions of elements, changes in level, and relationships between near and distant features. The exercise helps them connect an eye-level view with different forms of spatial representation.
As part of the drawing exercise, or as a separate study, ask students to estimate a space's width, a wall's height, or the distance between elements. They can use perceived relationships to their own bodies as an initial reference, then check their estimates against dimensioned drawings or other reliable measurements where available. Discussing the differences helps students refine their judgement of scale.
Use the collection's types and tags to select related projects, or choose spaces of a similar size. Ask students to examine how different layouts, wall heights, planting arrangements, and overhead elements affect enclosure and the sense of openness. Drawings and annotations can help them explain how different design decisions produce different spatial results.