The use of VR technologies to enhance methods for lighting design practice

Contemporary architecture, engineering and construction practices primarily use virtual reality (VR) either as a means for communication between the different disciplines, co-design, or as a presentation medium, that gives to clients a human-scale experience of a project. This situation also applies to the field of lighting design, creating a situation where the only area of the lighting design process not influenced by VR, is the area of the design itself. Ideally, lighting is designed within the context of a physical space, allowing a more accurate rendition and perception of how light influences its surroundings and the ability to convey the effects of spatial lighting similar to how humans would perceive them. However, such an approach to visually representing light in the earlier stages of the design is not currently possible. This paper presents a description of the development and testing of an immersive VR tool for the development of lighting design at a 1:1 scale in a real-time virtual environment (VE). While the project’s results are limited due to its proof-of-concept development stage, the responses from the participants indicate that the tool is advantageous in the design development as well as the design communication phases. The VR tool described allowed for more design iterations and experiments, better perception of spatial lighting effects, better representation of lighting at a 1:1 scale from a human perceptual perspective, and allows the lighting designer an opportunity to become an actor in the space rather than an observer behind a screen.