BATON ROUGE, La. — According to a recent study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), people spend more than 90% of their time indoors and a significant amount of energy is used to keep building occupants comfortable and mentally and physically healthy.

As a result, it’s important for the design and engineering community to better understand, analyze, and even predict human building interactions for structures still in the design phase. With this in mind, a team led by LSU construction management professor Yimin Zhu is using immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to measure individuals’ thermal states — i.e., sensation, comfort and acceptability — in an effort to reduce performance gaps in buildings between predicted and actual energy performance.