Optimizing Building Occupants' Energy-Related Behaviour: Development of a Training Activity in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment

The impact of the ‘human factor’ on building energy consumption is significant in contributing to the performance gap between estimated and actual energy use, even in energetically efficient buildings. A possible explanation is the users' limited awareness of available technologies to optimize energy performance. Emerging research has started focusing on enhancing user awareness on how their behaviour impact on building energy consumption and resulting sustainability. Recent activities have included also immersive three-dimensional virtual environments created using CAVE systems. These technologies are increasingly employed in academic and private research centres, demonstrating their influence on subjects' learning performance across various domains and their application in built environment research. However, current literature on user training domain is still limited, thus, the aim of this study is to develop an immersive training activity in a CAVE. This paper introduces the developed model and the assessment questionnaires for evaluating the effectiveness and the knowledge acquisition.