Immersive Virtual Reality for Buildings Occupants’ Work-Efficiency, Comfort and Behavioural Research Definition, Validation and Application of an Experimental Framework

Currently, people spend most of their time in enclosed spaces. The indoor environments where they live, and work shape their well-being, comfort, behaviour, perceptions and work efficiency. Even if the human dimension is at the forefront of concern in building design and regulation, the comprehension of human responses to indoor environmental factors is oversimplified. A crucial aspect is to create sustainable and conducive indoor environments for the health and well-being of the people. However, this is quite complex because individuals are exposed to several indoor variables at a time. A growing body of research is demonstrating the relevant impact of the environmental conditions on individuals’ comfort, work efficiency and behaviour but there is a scarcity of multi-domain analysis looking for the effect of all these variables at a time. A significant barrier to the acceleration of knowledge in this field is the difficulty of controlling and testing visual stimuli in laboratory-based studies in terms of the amount of time and resources needed for the setup which limits the generalizability of the results to real-life contexts. To this end, Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Virtual Environments (IVE) are suggested as alternative methods to facilitate the exploration of this research domain and leverage the adoption of advanced methodologies and experimental approaches to address and improve the human dimension in buildings. To date, there is a lack of a protocol and standardized methods to carry out experiments in VR and collect reliable data. These issues prevent the diffusion of VR for the comprehension of human-dimension and support evidence-based design. As a result, this thesis proposed a novel experimental framework to organise, carry out and enhance the adoption of VR technology on work efficiency, comfort and behavioural research. Firstly, the aim is to support researchers in how to strategically and effectively adopt VR technology. The second and third objectives are intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of such methodological approach and its potential to support multi-domain studies. To address these challenges a step-by-step experimental framework was defined. Secondly, an experimental activity to validate the framework and examine the suitability of the protocol and VR as a research tool was carried out by generating an immersive virtual office model and comparing it with its real counterpart. Finally, the framework and the model were applied to investigate the influence of indoor environment characteristics in multi-domain investigations. The outcomes of the present thesis revealed the potential of the developed framework as an effective and replicable tool. Namely, this valuable instrument has the potential to ensure the validity and generalizability of the research findings thus supporting the adoption of VR technology as a “data collector” mitigating the drawbacks of VR-based studies. The finding demonstrated the practical opportunity to expand the use of virtual environments to support the research in the built environment, building design practises and theories on human-centred comfort, work efficiency and behaviour avoiding the time and cost-consuming physical settings.