Abstract
It has been widely reported that rooms with larger windows tend to feel more spacious, and previous studies have found a significant impact of the particular external view that a window affords on people’s preferences for its size and shape. However, little is yet well-understood about how what is seen through the window affects either the subjective sense of spaciousness in a room or the apparent metric size of the interior space. We report the results of a two-part experiment with 14 participants that uses HMD-based immersive virtual reality technology to assess the impact of multiple characteristics of outdoor views on both subjective ratings of spaciousness within a room and on action-based judgments of the room size. Across four different outdoor view conditions, spanning day/night and vista distance variations, as well as three different control conditions including the use of frosted glass, substituting a 2D painting for the window, and removing the window altogether, we found no significant differences in participants’ spaciousness ratings. Comparing room size judgments in a subset of the aforementioned conditions, we found a slightly greater underestimation of egocentric distance to the opposing wall when it contained a window onto a distant vista than when the wall was blank, with intermediate results in the case that a painting, rather than a window, was present. We discuss possible explanations for these findings and outline planned follow-up studies.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (1526693, 1305401), by Carleton College’s Internship Funding program, by the CRA-W DREU program, and by the Linda and Ted Johnson Digital Design Consortium Endowment. This research extends work initiated in 2016 by Maria Francine Lapid and Tong Thao.
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Zhao, M., Sinnis-Bourozikas, A., Interrante, V. (2019). Exploring the Use of Immersive Virtual Reality to Assess the Impact of Outdoor Views on the Perceived Size and Spaciousness of Architectural Interiors. In: Bourdot, P., Interrante, V., Nedel, L., Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Zachmann, G. (eds) Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. EuroVR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11883. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31908-3_21
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