Immersive virtual environment (IVE) as a potential tool for interior colour study in office environments

Interior design elements, particularly colours, have shown significant influence on employers' performance in office environments. The task performance was often measured against different coloured offices in physical built environments. An identified challenge for these studies is to alter colour settings for experiments. Immersive virtual environment (IVE), as an advanced technology, may potentially address to this challenge. Although few studies applied IVE in colour related research, some studies have successfully applied IVE in light and space research for performance assessment. These studies underpin this research to examine the feasibility of applying IVE in colour studies. A virtual model of office environment was built and rendered in Autodesk building design suite (Revit and 3Ds MAX) and presented in Virtual Desktop. Within the virtual offices, only the wall colour was changed while the other parameters remained the same. This enabled the task performance to be measured in the IVE-made offices with different colours (including white, red, green and blue). Proofreading tasks were used for measuring the task performance in each coloured office. The data of error numbers and time expense were collected and then analysed by the analysis of variance (ANOVA). Two significant findings were identified. Firstly, compared to the other three colours, task performance in the white offices was the best. Secondly, performing tasks in red office has better performance than green and blue offices. These two significant findings were supported by several colour related studies although there were some research presenting different results. This study demonstrated the potential of applying IVE for interior colour research in office environments. This study can support a further assessment for the feasibility of IVE by evaluating human emotion and physiological conditions for our funded project.