2018_EJRNL_PP_GOKCE_OZCELIK_1.pdf
Terbatas Lili Sawaludin Mulyadi
» ITB
Terbatas Lili Sawaludin Mulyadi
» ITB
Thermal comfort influences occupant satisfaction, well-being and productivity in built environments. Several
decisions during the design stage (e.g., heating, ventilation, air conditioning design, color and placement of
furniture, etc.) impact the building occupants’ thermoception (i.e., the sense by which animals perceive the
temperature of the environment and their body). However, understanding the influence of design decisions on
occupant behavior is not always feasible due to the resources needed for creating physical testbeds and the need
for controlling several contributing factors to comfort and satisfaction. Virtual environments (environments
created with virtual reality technology) are novel venues for studying human behavior. However, in order to use
virtual environments in the thermoception domain, validation of these environments as adequate representations
of physical environments (built environments) is imperative. As the first step towards this goal, we
benchmarked virtual environments to physical environments under different thermal stimuli (i.e., hot and cold
indoor air temperature). We identified perceived thermal comfort and satisfaction, perceived indoor air temperature,
number and type of interactions as markers for the thermoceptive comparison of virtual and physical
offices. We conducted an experiment with 56 participants and pursued a systematic statistical analysis. The
results show that virtual environments are adequate representations of physical environments in the thermoception
domain, especially for subjective perceived thermal comfort and satisfaction assessment. We also found
that the type of first adaptive interactions could be used as the markers of thermoception in virtual environments.