Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Smart and Sustainable Built Environment

Publication Date

9-18-2026

Abstract

Purpose – Comfort discrepancies frequently persist in operational educational buildings despite compliance with indoor environmental quality (IEQ) standards. This study examines how perceived comfort evolves across sequential environmental configurations in immersive virtual reality (VR) when limited environmental control is introduced and subsequently withdrawn. Design/methodology/approach – A repeated-measures experiment was conducted with 81 university students performing an identical spatial task across three conditions within the same virtual classroom: baseline, user-choice (selection of one IEQ dimension: sound, thermal, or lighting), and programmed reversion to baseline. Overall perceived comfort was assessed after each exposure. Findings – Comfort increased significantly following the introduction of user choice, and no statistically significant decline was observed after reversion to baseline. The magnitude of improvement did not differ across IEQ dimensions. Perceived environmental control was positively associated with the comfort level during the user-choice condition but was not related to the magnitude of comfort change. Research limitations/implications – Short exposure duration and reliance on subjective measures limit conclusions regarding long-term adaptation, physiological response, and the extent to which observed effects reflect short-term appraisal rather than sustained comfort. Practical implications – VR-based sequential evaluation may support exploratory comfort assessment in shared educational buildings by allowing individualized environmental options to be tested before physical modification. Originality/value – The study conceptualizes comfort as a temporally structured experience rather than a static response, introducing a sequential immersive design to examine how constrained environmental choice and short-term experiential context shape comfort appraisal in post-occupancy evaluation.

ISSN

2046-6099

Publisher

Emerald

First Page

1

Last Page

20

Disciplines

Architecture

Keywords

Adaptive comfort, Educational buildings, Indoor environmental quality, Perceived environmental control, Task-based assessment, Virtual reality

Scopus ID

105051420833

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Hybrid: This publication is openly available in a subscription-based journal/series

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