Evaluating and visualizing perceptual impressions of daylighting in immersive virtual environments

Abstract

This paper proposes a gamified approach to collect and visualize human perception of daylighting in large-scale indoor environments using immersive virtual environments (IVEs). The developed system was tested by 20 participants, where their daylighting preferences for the virtual environment were collected at two daytimes through snapshotting and evaluating their points of interest in terms of brightness, as well as their evaluation of the system and daylight quality. Afterward, participants’ feedback was visualized into a perceptive lighting map (PLM) and compared to an image-based quantitative metric. The results of this experimental study found a tendency among participants to report more feedback in areas with large daylight portals rather than other areas with similar light intensity. Additionally, results from both subjective and simulation-based metrics showed consistency in defining daylight intensity, as well as explained the occurrence of contradicting user evaluations of some identical areas in IVE as a result of high contrast in brightness. The findings showed the adequacy of the proposed system as a visual source of user-centered feedback to daylighting in the early stages of design, as well as a supplement tool for building performance simulations (BPS).

Keywords

• daylight
• perception
• immersive virtual environment
• game-engine