Relation between the perceived atmosphere of a lit environment and perceptual attributes of light

Abstract

The impression of a space depends hugely on the light in the space, more specifically on the intensity, colour, beam shape and position of the light sources in that space. This relation though is very complex. The present study aims at understanding the relation between parameters of a lighting design and the resulting perceptions, focusing on the effect that overall brightness and perceived uniformity of the light in the space have on the perceived atmosphere of that space. Employing high-quality visualisations, we found that atmosphere perception can be accurately described by a second-order polynomial as a function of the two perceptual light attributes. In addition, we evaluated how well objective measures reported in literature predict brightness and perceived uniformity.