Innovative approaches for building occupant centric design. Redefining and advancing building research in immersive virtual environments

The built environment shapes occupants’ well-being, comfort, behaviour, perceptions and productivity due to the huge amount of time spent indoors. 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 in academia. Indeed, the complexities of multi-sensorial analysis and the limitations of traditional laboratory settings cause challenges in building occupants’ research. Virtual Reality and Immersive Virtual Environments are suggested as alternative methods to explore this research domain.Despite the proven potential of these solutions, the lack of standardized protocols and methods to collect reliable data limits their diffusion.