The Rasa-Śarīra Scale: development and validation of a culturally grounded instrument for measuring embodied aesthetic learning in architectural heritage games
This paper presents the development and validation of the Rasa-Śarīra Scale, a culturally grounded 25-item instrument based on classical Indian aesthetics and embodied cognition theory, which successfully measures embodied aesthetic learning in architectural heritage games and demonstrates superior effectiveness over passive walkthroughs in an experimental study.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine you are walking through a massive, ancient stone temple. You don't just see the towering pillars; you feel the coolness of the granite against your palm, hear the echo of your footsteps in the vast hall, and sense your own body shrinking in awe as you look up at the ceiling. This isn't just "seeing" with your eyes; it's a full-body experience where your muscles, skin, and breath are part of the learning process. Scientists call this embodied cognition: the idea that our bodies aren't just vehicles for our brains, but that our physical sensations actually help us understand the world.
For a long time, researchers studying video games and virtual reality have been stuck in a weird loop. They build amazing, immersive games about history and architecture, hoping students will learn by "feeling" the space. But when they test the students with standard quizzes or surveys about "how much fun they had" or "how real it felt," the results are often boringly flat. The games don't seem to teach anything better than a boring textbook. Meanwhile, students tell stories about how the game made them feel the rhythm of the columns or the weight of the stone. The problem, the researchers suspect, is that the rulers they are using to measure learning are broken. They are measuring "fun" or "presence" (like how real the graphics look) instead of measuring the actual embodied learning—the specific way the body understands architecture.
This paper introduces a new tool called the Rasa-Śarīra Scale (RSS) to fix that broken ruler. The authors, working in the field of educational psychology and architectural design, wanted to create a way to measure exactly what the body learns when it explores a historic building in a video game. They didn't just borrow a ruler from Western psychology; instead, they built a new one based on ancient Indian aesthetic theory (specifically the Nāṭyaśāstra), which has been describing how humans experience art through the body for thousands of years.
Here is what they did and what they found:
The New Ruler: A Five-Step Journey
The researchers created a 25-question survey called the Rasa-Śarīra Scale. Instead of asking "Did you like this?" or "Was it scary?", the questions are designed to track a specific five-step journey the body takes when it encounters a beautiful building. They named these steps using Sanskrit words, which roughly translate to:
- The Desire to Touch: The moment your hand reaches out or your feet step closer to a detail.
- Playful Movement: The way you walk, bend, or crane your neck to follow the shape of the building.
- Body Knowledge: The deep, non-verbal feeling of the stone's weight or the temperature of the air.
- Embodied Wonder: The physical reaction of goosebumps or holding your breath when you see something amazing.
- Union with Place: The feeling that the building was made specifically for your body, and the line between you and the space blurs.
The Experiment: Game vs. Walk
To test if this new ruler worked, the researchers set up a fair fight. They took 100 architecture students and split them into two groups. Both groups put on a Virtual Reality (VR) headset and visited a digital recreation of the famous Vijaya Vittala Temple in Hampi, India.
- Group A played an "embodied game." They had to perform physical actions to progress: they had to manipulate objects to understand scale, bend their bodies to fit through spaces, and pay attention to material textures.
- Group B just did a "passive walkthrough." They could walk around the same temple in the same VR headset, but they had no tasks, no puzzles, and no physical prompts. They just looked around.
The Results: The Body Knows What the Brain Misses
When the researchers used their new RSS scale to measure the students, the results were clear. The group that played the active, physical game scored significantly higher on the scale than the group that just walked around. The difference was large enough to be statistically significant, suggesting that the physical mechanics of the game actually helped the students' bodies "learn" the architecture.
Even more interesting, the scale acted like a high-tech lie detector for the technology itself. The scale had questions about things like "feeling the temperature difference between a hot courtyard and a cool stone room" and "feeling your breathing change in a small space." The game group scored high on almost everything except these two specific questions. Why? Because the VR headset and controllers couldn't actually make the students feel hot or cold, or change their breathing. The scale correctly identified that the game failed to deliver those specific physical sensations. This proved the tool was precise: it could tell the difference between what the game actually did and what it didn't.
What This Means
The study found that the five steps they designed (the Sanskrit stages) work together as one single, powerful measure of "embodied aesthetic experience." While they are five distinct steps in theory, in the data, they act like a single unified feeling. The researchers also tested the scale on 250 other students and found it was very reliable and consistent.
The paper concludes that we have been measuring the wrong things. We've been asking if students felt "present" or "awed," but we should be asking if their bodies actually learned the architecture. This new scale offers a way to measure that body-learning, especially in the context of Indian heritage, using a theory that actually belongs to that culture. It suggests that if we want to teach history and architecture through games, we need to design games that speak to the body, and we need tools like this one to prove that it's working.
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