Virtual reality and digital modeling go on trial for a federal courtroom design
By Alan Joch

	Arup tested the courtroom’s acoustics (top) and helped build 3D models for lighting and sight-line analysis (below). The team noticed a potential glare problem behind the jury box (below) during the CAVE walkthrough.

Justice may be blind, but some federal judges in Mississippi have been seeing in 3D. In recent months, they’ve been part of a pilot project launched by the General Services Administration (GSA) to use virtual reality in the design process. Twice last year, the judges donned red-and-green 3D glasses, like those from 1950s movie theaters, to view stereographic representations of their new courtroom in Jackson long before its construction. Sponsors of the pilot project hope the design team and client can flag problems with sight lines, lighting, and materials before the courtroom is built, to avoid retrofits or costly change orders.

Federal courtrooms aren’t cookie-cutter designs. Each judiciary voices preferences for room geometries and the placement of elements like the judge’s bench, counsel tables, the jury box, and the witness stand. To visualize designs prior to construction—which is key for preventing problems with sight lines among the various courtroom parties—clients typically review 2D drawings and crude plywood mock-ups costing $50,000 or more to build. Could sophisticated imaging technology create better 3D representations and reduce errors?

This question was posed by Renée Tietjen, AIA, a senior architect in the office of applied science of the GSA, which contracts with private-sector architects for federal courthouses. The Jackson project seemed well suited for a new approach. “The space was a modified ellipse, and we thought there might be some problems,” she recalls.

PC-generated walkthroughs alone aren’t sufficient to validate the design issues the team sought to resolve. “I abhor them because you’re always looking straight ahead,” says Hugh Hardy, FAIA, principal of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture of New York, the courtroom’s architect. Instead, the judges met with the design team at Disney Imagineering Studios in California—once in June 2004 to test sight lines, and once in December to assess lighting. There, a special room called a CAVE (Computer Automatic Virtual Environment) houses a wraparound screen that stereoscopically reproduced a life-size virtual model of the courtroom. Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE), a virtual design research center, built the 3D model based on CAD drawings, with help from the engineering firm Arup in New York.

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During the model walkthrough, courtroom elements could be rearranged based on the feedback of judges and others. After getting the judges’ response, Hardy and the GSA refined a number of design elements, including lowering the view-blocking rail on the top of the judge’s bench, and the CAVE sessions also resolved where the counsel tables would be located.

To validate the design’s acoustic characteristics, the GSA relied on a 3D sound model created by Arup Acoustics, which was tested last summer at the firm’s sound lab in New York, where judges could hear accurate simulations of speech. “If there are any problems, we can proactively work to fix them,” says Raj Patel, principal consultant at Arup. Acoustic revisions in the Jackson courtroom included changing some surface shapes and adding sound-absorbing materials to improve speech intelligibility.

Paul Marantz, the project’s lighting designer and a partner of Fisher Marantz Stone of New York, notes some of the limitations of the virtual-reality process for lighting analysis. Contrast ratios below what’s perceptible by the human eye block out shadows and highlights in the 3D environment that people would normally see in a real room. Nevertheless, because lighting isn’t evaluated at all in a plywood courtroom mock-up, Marantz feels the CAVE experience was valuable. “We were able to fix a half-dozen issues—none of which was fatal. But it gave us the opportunity to improve the design.”

Tietjen, who declines to say how much the pilot cost, says the technology proved itself as a design tool. Now the challenge lies with the GSA to streamline the feedback process. “We need to bring the technology to clients, not the clients to the technology,” she says. But for Judge William Barbour, U.S. District Court judge for the southern district of Mississippi, the jury is still out. “We won’t know if virtual reality accurately simulated the courtroom until we get through with the building,” he says. “But my initial impression is yes, it definitely did.”