Adequacy of Immersive Virtual Reality for the Perception of Daylit Spaces: Comparison of Real and Virtual Environments

Abstract

-This paper presents a novel experimental method which uses a Virtual Reality (VR) headset, aiming to provide an alternative environment for the conduction of subjective assessments of daylit spaces. This method can overcome the difficulty of controlling the variation of luminous conditions, one of the main challenges in experimental studies using daylight, while its novelty lies in the implementation of physically-based renderings into an immersive virtual environment. The present work investigates the adequacy of the proposed method to evaluate five aspects of subjective perception of daylit spaces: the perceived pleasantness, interest, excitement, complexity and satisfaction with the amount of view in the space. To this end, experiments with 29 participants were conducted, to comparing the user's perception of a real daylit environment and its equivalent representation in VR and testing the effect of the display method on the participants' perceptual evaluations, reported physical symptoms, and their perceived presence in the virtual space. The results indicate a high level of perceptual accuracy, showing no significant differences between the real and virtual environments on the studied evaluations. In addition, there was a high level of perceived presence in the virtual environment and no significant effects on the participants' physical symptoms after the use of the VR headset. Following these findings, the presented experimental method in VR seems very promising for use as a surrogate to real environments in investigating the aforementioned five dimensions of perception in daylit spaces.

Window Size Effects on Subjective Impressions of Daylit Spaces: Indoor Studies at High Latitudes Using Virtual Reality

“…To address the methodological constraints that studies with daylighting usually present, the present study employs a virtual reality (VR) headset following a VR-based experimental method that was developed and validated against real environments for investigating the perception of daylit spaces (Chamilothori et al 2019b).…”

“…HMD VR displays have been shown as suitable in reproducing several aspects of visual perception (e.g. pleasantness, excitement, or interest) in interior spaces when comparing real and virtual reality environments depicting both daylit (Chamilothori et al 2019b) and artificially lit scenes (Abd-Alhamid et al 2019;Higuera-Trujillo et al 2017). However, due the limited luminance range of the display in current HMD VR displays, some aspects of visual perception, such as glare, cannot be investigated.…”

“…In order to generate the images to be shown in the VR headset, a specific protocol was followed, adapted from the workflow developed in (Chamilothori et al 2019b). First, each space was modeled in 3D using the software Rhinoceros, and then exported, including material properties derived from measurements (cf.…”

Application of High-Dynamic Range Imaging Techniques in Architecture: A Step toward High-Quality Daylit Interiors?

“…This is, today, more important than ever as, in industrialized countries, people spend more than 80% of their time indoors. In the present study, the interest of IBL in the frame of validation works investigating the perceptual equivalence between actual and virtual daylit environments such as [18,36] has not been highlighted, as gendaylit and gensky_br give similar results to IBL. Moreover generating skies with gendaylit or gensky is far less laborious than preparing HDR sky images for IBL renderings.…”

Appraising the intention of other people: Ecological validity and procedures for investigating effects of lighting for pedestrians

“…VR presents a new alternative to move real settings into the laboratory, although there remain challenges for the representation of lighting. 94 …”