Spatial perception of ceiling height and type variation in immersive virtual environments

End-user participation during the design review plays an important role in improving the quality of building products. For a long while it has been constrained by the complexity of design information requiring architectural expertise to be clearly understood. Recent advances in virtual reality technology, such as the HMD-based immersive virtual environment (HIVE), help end-users to understand building designs intuitively and clearly and thus involve them in the design review. However, for HIVE to be employed in end-user participation investigators first need to determine how realistically this technology can represent the physical environment. Despite the importance of the spatial perception for end-users' feedback, there has been little evidence that HIVE allows spatial perceptions of building design comparable to those in the real world. The present study therefore aimed to investigate spatial perceptions in HIVE. We conducted surveys of affective responses, room appraisal, the sense of presence, together with reading comprehension tasks, in four different virtual environments by manipulating ceiling height and type. As a result, distinctive spatial perceptions were found in the virtual environment, reflecting variations in experimental conditions and resembling those in the real world. Thus the study contributes to our understanding of the immersive virtual environment and its potential for end-user participation during the design review.