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The written questionnaires contained questions about the ar-
chitectural visual qualities of the room. Nine of those questions
were in a scale format (Semantic Differential Scale), where
a group of 3 adjectives represented each dependent vari-
able; these adjectives can be referred as
Architectural Quality
Descriptors:
Friendliness
Complexity
Spaciousness
Pleasant – Unpleasant Simple – Complex Spacious – Tight
Exciting – Dull
Legible – Illegible Open – Closed
Ordered – Chaotic
Coherent – Incoherent Spatially Defined-Undefined
Other nine questions were “comments” were they were free to
write comments or not. The rest of the questions were about
the overall evaluation of the room. At the end of the quantitative
part of the experiment, participants were free to go and those
who were voluntarily willing to stay and have a qualitative inter-
view, remained to be interviewed. The goal with this interview
was to gather extra information that could complement the an-
swers given in the questionnaires. Four of the participants vol-
unteered to get interviewed. The interviews were private, where
the main experimenter sat alone with each of the participant
to have a debriefing time and asked pre-established questions.
The interviews last around 20 minutes with each person, and it
was documented in writing by the experimenter.
Preliminary Results
At the delivery of this essay, the collected data from the pilot
study needs more time to be statistically processed and for
final conclusions to be drawn. However, some first results were
found between VE and RE:
• The order, coherence and spatial definition show more
similarity between VE and RE in the white room and D1.
• The order of a room was equally evaluated in both VE and RE
in the black room. The scores did not only were the same in
both environments, but also in three different daylight
conditions.
• The legibility of a room also threw similar scores when
evaluated in both VE and RE in the white room with the three
different daylight stimuli.
• The complexity of the white room with D2 obtained very
similar evaluations in both VE and RE.
• The white room with D3 obtained similar scores in both
environments in more architectural quality descriptors than
any other presented stimuli. Among them, the scores of the
pleasantness, spaciousness, exciting level, legibility,
openness, order, coherence and spatial definition showed
similarity with very small variance between scores.
Considering this last discussed point, the first results seem
to show that high daylight levels and white wall surfaces of a
room are a better condition to evaluate a room in VE with these
characteristics than a room with lower daylight levels and
black wall surfaces. The assessment of a small room under
this situation seems to be possible to perform equally well with
VE as in RE.
During the qualitative interview, interesting answers from
the participants were collected. All the participants that were
interviewed mentioned that even when they could perceive a
large difference between evaluating the VE than the RE, their
scores were not significant different. They also mentioned that
some architectural quality descriptors, like order, legibility and
spatial definition, were easier to assess. The scores from the
questionnaires corroborate this information (See list of prelimi-
nary results). All of the interviewed participants acknowledged
the interaction of both daylight and colour as the room char-
acteristics that were responsible for their overall perception of
the room in both VE and RE.
Discussion of daylight level, wall colour and evaluation of room
atmosphere
This study has been focused on the testing of the new method
(VE); however some interesting observations have been made
from the obtained scores of the pilot study. For example, by
making a comparison between the white and the black room,
considering the same size of windows, it seems that the colour
of the wall surfaces becomes important in the evaluation of
a room, i.e. the interaction between the white walls and the
different daylight stimuli threw significant higher scores in the
friendliness, complexity and spaciousness descriptors than the
black walls and the same daylight stimuli. This means that it
is important to notice that the interaction between the daylight
level and the colour of the wall surfaces played an important
role in the evaluation of the environments.
Concluding Remarks
The experience of the VE is obviously different from a RE in
many ways. Despite these differences, the preliminary results
of the pilot study show a positive approximation to the usabil-
ity of virtual environments (3D pictures) as a research tool to
study certain architectural quality descriptors in small rooms
with white wall surfaces and high illuminances. However, the
robustness of the results needs to be increased by corroborat-
ing this information with a statistical processing of the data
and by conducting more experiments with a larger sample of
participants.