VRooms: Fighting Climate Change with Increasing the Utilisation of Buildings by Virtualizing Rooms through Everyday Extended Reality

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Enrico Rukzio
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547748299

Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, if not the currently greatest. The unbroken, steady rise in global greenhouse gas emissions requires a fundamental rethinking of how we design and use buildings, as they are responsible for 39% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions. Today’s usage of websites, services, and applications is enabled by cloud computing, which relies on the principle of server virtualization that creates an abstraction layer over the physical servers and provides virtual servers to their users. With VRooms, we transfer this concept that has already revolutionized the utilization of servers to buildings by virtualizing physical rooms, which will significantly increase their environmentally sustainable usage.This will be achieved by using Everyday E(x)tended Reality (EXR) glasses that, for the first time, allow the perceptually satisfying, affordable, and technologically feasible partial or complete virtualization of our rooms. Partially or fully decoupling physical rooms from their perception by their users opens up a huge potential for stopping the trend towards larger and more numerous rooms while stabilizing or improving our living and working conditions. The virtualization of rooms will be researched through three fundamental VRooms space concepts: (i) the usage of a physical room for multiple parallel purposes, (ii) the perceptual enlargement of a physical room, and (iii) using a room for diverse virtualized purposes through time-sharing by adapting the physical appearance of a room. VRooms could already be used in today’s rooms but will, in the long term, also lead to three VRooms room levels (subsequent, optimized, only) that will be researched in the project, which are based on much more environmentally sustainable room and floor plans optimized for VRooms usage and that will therefore only be partially usable without EXR. The VRooms vision will be enabled by addressing 10 unique and novel research challenges regarding (1) ecological benefits, (2) understanding rooms, (3) extended reality, (4) illusions, (5) multi-user multi-virtualizations, (6) un-constraining haptics, (7) shape-changing rooms, (8) in-situ design, (9) acceptability and well-being, and (10) ethics within the project. VRooms has the tremendous potential to reduce the number and volume of buildings as well as their carbon footprint by up to 50% while maintaining or even improving their usability and perceived comfort. This project will break new ground by researching the VRooms space concepts (parallelizing, enlarging, time-sharing), the VRooms room levels (subsequent, optimized, only), and the 10 interrelated unique research challenges. The VRooms project will stand out for its revolutionary approach by embracing these challenges in the VRooms research and living lab and private model households through longitudinal evaluations.

• DFG Programme: Reinhart Koselleck Projects