Interactive Lighting Design Research Articles

Nightlife in historical sites: between lights and shadows (visions and challenges)

PurposeThe paper aims to describe the positive and negative effects of night lights in historical sites, as well as the most salient challenges faced by the visitors of these sites and determine ways to address them. The study aims to suggest several light-and-shadow approaches and designs to enhance the experience of visiting historical sites.Design/methodology/approachThis study identifies problems of nightlife in historical sites with an online international questionnaire to determine the preferences and difficulties faced by visitors of historical sites during day and night. After that Egypt was determined as a sample case of a developing country; its archaeological sites need to be improved. The main problems of historical Egyptian sites were investigated and approaches in developing historical sites with interactive lighting design were presented after an online questionnaire to the Egyptian society.FindingsThe paper shows that archaeological sites need some development, especially in their technological and lighting aspects, to overcome visitors’ low night-time interest in archaeological sites. Research has found certain limitations in the effects of constructing artificial illumination. The study provides modern sustainable solution for some light challenges in historical sites with approaches and solutions to solve it.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of that research could be applied in developing countries, but with larger specific studies to the historical urban locations according to the politics of the country.Practical implicationsThe paper includes sustainable approaches in developing historical sites with technological lighting design required to enhance historical sites at night-time and make visits more interactive and interesting.Originality/valueThis paper presents an identified need of historical sites visitors’ to study applying modern approaches in enhancing urban historical sites.

An experience-based interactive lighting design approach using BIM and VR: a case study

A lighting condition has a significant influence on humans’ concentration, performance, and eye comfort. A well-designed lighting environment is critical for work efficiency and human health. Lighting design is commonly based on designer’s previous experience and computational lighting simulation results. Although simulations can provide relatively accurate calculation results, several difficulties exist in terms of measuring actual users’ experience and reflecting their feedback into the design. In this traditional approach, users are unable to experience or feel realistic lighting effects until the installation phase. This lack of user experience in the design phase leads to increasing risk of redesign and revision, which are extremely time-consuming and reduce the efficiency of lighting design. Therefore, it is necessary to minimize the gap between the lighting design and users’ satisfaction. This research aims to enhance visualization of lighting design and thus improve the design efficiency by developing a real-time interactive lighting design approach using building information modeling (BIM) and virtual reality (VR) technologies. By integrating these technologies, the proposed approach is able to support user interactions, actual activities simulation, and personalized lighting design. In addition, the proposed approach can provide users with immersive and sensory experiences to evaluate their lighting design alternatives. The whole process of the approach includes 3D modeling in Revit, texture mapping in 3ds Max, simulation analysis in DIALux, and interactions development and VR realization in Unity. A case study was conducted to implement and validate the proposed approach. In this case study, users were able to experience realistic lighting effects and provide their feedback for improving the design in a sensory way while lighting simulation was automatically conducted simultaneously. The approach enables better user experience and provides a practical way to apply BIM and VR technologies to improve the efficiency of real-time interactive lighting design.

LightGuider: Guiding Interactive Lighting Design using Suggestions, Provenance, and Quality Visualization.

LightGuider is a novel guidance-based approach to interactive lighting design, which typically consists of interleaved 3D modeling operations and light transport simulations. Rather than having designers use a trial-and-error approach to match their illumination constraints and aesthetic goals, LightGuider supports the process by simulating potential next modeling steps that can deliver the most significant improvements. LightGuider takes predefined quality criteria and the current focus of the designer into account to visualize suggestions for lighting-design improvements via a specialized provenance tree. This provenance tree integrates snapshot visualizations of how well a design meets the given quality criteria weighted by the designer's preferences. This integration facilitates the analysis of quality improvements over the course of a modeling workflow as well as the comparison of alternative design solutions. We evaluate our approach with three lighting designers to illustrate its usefulness.

Interactive Lighting Design with Hierarchical Light Representation

AbstractLighting design plays a crucial role in indoor lighting design, computer cinematograph and many other applications. Computer‐assisted lighting design aims to find a lighting configuration that best approximates the illumination effect specified by designers. In this paper, we present an automatic approach for lighting design, in which discrete and continuous optimization of the lighting configuration, including the number, intensity, and position of lights, are achieved. Our lighting design algorithm consists of two major steps. The first step estimates an initial lighting configuration by light sampling and clustering. The initial light clusters are then recursively merged to form a light hierarchy. The second step optimizes the lighting configuration by alternatively selecting a light cut on the light hierarchy to determine the number of representative lights and optimizing the lighting parameters using the simplex method. To speed up the optimization computation, only illumination at scene vertices that are important to rendering are sampled and taken into account in the optimization. Using the proposed approach, we develop a lighting design system that can compute appropriate lighting configurations to generate the illumination effects iteratively painted and modified by a designer interactively.

A Quick Rendering Method Using Basis Functions for Interactive Lighting Design

AbstractWhen designing interior lighting effects, it is desirable to compare a variety of lighting designs involving different lighting devices and directions of light. It is, however, time‐consuming to generate images with many different lighting parameters, taking interreflection into account, because all luminances must be calculated and recalculated. This makes it difficult to design lighting effects interactively. To address this problem, this paper proposes a method of quickly generating images of a given scene illustrating an interreflective environment illuminated by sources with arbitrary luminous intensity distributions. In the proposed method, the luminous intensity ditribution is expressed with basis functions. The proposed method uses a series of spherical harmonic functions as basis functions, and calculates in advance each intensity on surfaces lit by the light sources whose luminous intensity distribution are the same as the spherical harmonic functions. The proposed method makes it possible to generate images so quickly that we can change the luminous intensity distribution interactively. Combining the proposed method with an interactive walk‐through that employs intensity mapping, an interactive system for lighting design is implemented. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated by its application to interactive lighting design, where many images are generated by altering lighting devices and/or direction of light.