Exploring Thermally-Driven Occupant Behavior in Immersive Virtual Environments to Enhance the Design and Engineering of Sustainable Buildings

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Buildings are a major consumer of energy in the U.S. The goal of this research is to create a human-centered design and engineering environment for sustainable buildings where occupant thermal state (sensation, comfort and acceptability) and thermally-driven behaviors are effectively measured to reduce building performance gaps between predicted and actual energy performance. Specifically, this project examines if immersive virtual environments (IVEs) integrated within a climate chamber, i.e., multi-sensory IVEs, are effective for observing thermally-driven occupant behavior and for improving models of human-building interactions. The findings could result in new and effective strategies for reducing energy consumption in buildings. Building on pilot studies by the PIs, this project will: 1) determine if the virtual experience of participants significantly alters their thermal states and thermally-driven behaviors compared to in-situ experience; 2) determine if seasonal mismatch of immersive virtual environment and actual environment (i.e., simulating winter during summer data collection) significantly alters the thermal state and thermally-driven occupant behaviors compared to those in seasonally matched IVE conditions; and 3) create a mechanism of sharing IVE data and analytics on the virtual information fabric infrastructure (VIFI) platform to support the replication of science in a large multi-institutional research community. Currently, designers and engineers rely on predictive models based on data from existing buildings to make decisions about future building designs. When the impact of context on occupants is ignored, performance gaps emerge between the projected and actual energy performance of a building. Evidence from both academic research and practice strongly suggests that IVEs are capable of eliciting human responses to well-designed stimuli such as in lightingdesign, but conventional IVEs alone cannot simulate cooling or heating as in real buildings. Climate chambers have long been used as a reliable apparatus for studying occupant thermal states, but they cannot easily induce occupant behavior in response to design contexts. Multi-sensory IVEs combine the strength of IVEs and climate chambers, but the effectiveness of multi-sensory IVEs to produce comparable thermal state and thermally-driven occupant behavior as in-situ experiments is unknown. This new knowledge will enable the creation of context-sensitive, human-centered approaches using multi-sensory IVEs for building design and engineering, and occupant behavior data collection. Sustainable buildings are essential for sustaining the wellbeing of individuals, families and the society. Buildings consume more than 30% of the world's primary energy, largely for providing thermal comfort. A better understanding of occupant's thermally-driven occupant behavior during design is thus critical tosustainable buildings. Multi-sensory IVEs not only provide a new tool to support the design and engineering of sustainable buildings, but also present intellectual challenges to other scientific fields. To maximize the impact of this research, the PIs will create a novel approach for data sharing and research replication by collaborating with researchers in the VIFI team, a research coordination network called sustainable human-building ecosystems (SHBE), as well as with technical committees of ASHRAE.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.