Beata Stahre

Perception of color and space in virtual reality: a comparison between a real room and virtual reality models

Virtual Reality has great potential to become a usable design tool for the planning of light and colour in buildings. The technical development has provided us with better computer graphics and faster rendering techniques. However, the reliability and usability is delimited by lack of knowledge about how humans perceive spatial colour phenomena. The setting up of parameters for material properties in light calculation software is done arbitrarily. We present a comparison between a real room and a digital model evaluated on a desktop PC and in an Immersive Projection Technology (IPT) type system. Data were collected from video recorded interviews and questionnaires. The participants assessed the appearance of light, colours and space. They also evaluated their involvement in solving this task, and their presence in each environment. Our results highlight the benefits and disadvantages of the real and virtual models. The participants had difficulties in estimating the size of both the desktop room and the room in the ITP system. The comparison of real and virtual rooms revealed unsatisfying differences in shadowing and colour appearance. We defined the magnitude of perceived colour reflections in the real room, and elaborated with some of the parameters in Lightscape/3dsmax6.

To Colour the Virtual World - Difficulties in Visualizing Spatial Colour Appearance in Virtual Environments

This paper discusses the problems of visualizing colour appearance in an interactive virtual environment (VE) from the viewpoint of practice based architectural research. The discussion is based upon the research information project Virtual Colour Laboratory (VCL), the aim of which is to visually present and demonstrate existing research results on spatial colour phenomena for educational purposes, in the shape of a software application. During the work on this project, various problems connected to the visualization of colour appearance have emerged which are discussed in relation to current research on spatial experience and visual appearance in VEs. The aim of the paper is to focus on the importance of colour appearance in digital modelling as well as to highlight the problems of visualizing colour appearance interactively. The term colour appearance is used here as a general concept for the perceived colour of a surface or object.