Abstract

In two experiments the perception of the ceiling-height, comfortable ceiling- height, human sensibility of a room in a virtual environment were investigated. While the brightness of wall-color had no effect on perception of ceiling height, it affected the human sensibility of a room. Height of subjects didn't influence perception of the ceiling-height but did influence the perception of a comfortable ceiling-height. The result that there was a significant difference in comfortable ceiling height along the subject height was congruent with the intrinsic body scaled information of Warren and Mark. 2.496m in small group and 2.678m in tall group were discovered as the comfort ceiling-height from our experiment. π for small group was 1.64, and π for tall group was 1.54. The artificial eye-height which has 18.3cm difference with subjects' eye-height had no effect on either of the perception of the ceiling-height and the perception of the comfortable ceiling-height. The artificial eye-height didn't yield any significant difference in perception of the comfortable ceiling-height conflicted with the results of the previous research of Warren and Mark. It was conjectured that the difference might comes from the fact that the previous experiments used the peephole and allowed the subjects to use the monocular vision only whereas the present experiments allowed the subjects explore the room as much as possible in the virtual environment.