Maintainability Assessment of Light Design Using Game Simulation, Virtual Reality, and Brain Sensing Technologies

Maintenance and repair are important tasks in building operations; how fast, easy and economic these activities are carried out directly affects the amount of resources (i.e., time and money) to be spent. This impacts a building’s life cycle cost and its level of service. Improving maintenance efficiency can provide notable benefits. However, in the current practice the maintainability is not fully considered during the design phase. This has led to many issues, such as the lack of accessibility to some building components, which threats the effective performance of maintainability tasks in terms of safety, time, and cost. In response, this research aims to develop methods to support the assessment of a building design through integrating game simulation, virtual reality, and brain sensing technologies. Light fixture is selected to be the focus. Bulb placement is a common maintenance activity that can be performed by most individuals without any expert knowledge/skills; but there is a high safety risk if the right procedure is not followed. In this study, three different light design alternatives (i.e., wall-mounted, hung bulb, and ceiling lamp) were created and tested by 13 volunteers in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) using game simulation. In addition, participants’ brain waves were recorded during this simulation through an EEG brain sensing device to assess their emotions. The main task to perform was to place the bulb in the different designs/configurations. A survey was conducted afterwards to collect data about their subjective judgement of comfort, safety, and preferences. The data was analyzed to compare different designs from the user’s perspective based on their emotional states; the result provided an insight into the maintainability of building light fixtures at the design phase.