Wang and colleagues use underground space as a demanding test case for human-centred environmental evaluation because reduced daylight, weakened exterior reference and restricted sensory information intensify problems of orientation, comfort and perceived safety. Reviewing twenty-eight VR studies, they organise environmental variables through a perception–cognition–emotion framework and map how spatial clarity, scale, signage, lighting, biophilic intervention and wayfinding influence reported experience. The paper’s methodological strength lies in treating VR as a pre-construction experimental medium rather than as a surrogate reality: design alternatives can be manipulated systematically while perceptual, cognitive, behavioural and physiological responses are compared. At the same time, the review identifies the limitations of visually dominated, short-duration and single-factor experiments and calls for multisensory, multifactor and repeated-exposure protocols. Its wider bridge is to performance-based design, where virtual environments become reversible prototypes for testing spatial consequences before construction while remaining accountable to eventual validation in embodied, real-world conditions.
