Subjective thermal response driving indoor comfort perception: A novel experimental analysis coupling building information modelling and virtual reality

Building sector professionals, together with building physicists and human scientists, recognize the occupants' key role in determining final buildings energy needs. Occupants’ behavior is strongly influenced by their perception and represents a major variable affecting buildings' energy performance, but its impact is difficult to predict since the early design stage. This study proposes a new analysis framework and field test method to better comprehend and monitor people environmental perception and attitudes since the design stage, while stimulated through immersive environment modeled in a parametric platform, able to change every specific aspect of the future spaces. To this aim, a physical office room was re-designed through virtual reality (VR) and sense-of-presence feeling was registered, with a 76% of satisfaction rate. The VR designed environment was therefore used to reproduce key design variables without modifying the indoor thermal-energy environment during the experiment. Three triggers were simulated, i.e. glass filter, window aspect ratio, and artificial lighting color temperature. Both these two latter variables significantly produced placebo effects on most of the interviewed people, who declared to feel relatively hotter in high aspect ratio window conditions and low color temperature. As expected, non-thermal triggers may affect indoor thermal perception and, potentially, may induce better thermal satisfaction and energy saving behaviors, if properly considered. The proposed novel method can assist building design since the early stages, leading to low-cost and human-centric energy efficiency enhancements. •Placebo effect of building design on indoor comfort analyzed through VR.•Integrated modelling workflow in BIM to minimize computational effort.•Method validation shows 76% satisfaction of sense of presence in VR.•Thermal sensation varies across scenes in VR under same boundaries.•Different responses observed for male and female subgroups.