The role of the subjective assessment in lighting research using virtual reality

Immersive virtual reality allows showing people virtual environments with high levels of presence, realism and “feeling of being”, as if they were in the real world. To reach this goal, virtual environments have to provoke perceptions that people experience in physical ones and ensure correct light distributions. A way to evaluate the virtual reality accuracy in reproducing real spaces is to perform experiments with human subjects. In this paper, the role of subjective assessments in lighting research using virtual reality is investigated. Review highlights that subjective assessments play an essential role in using virtual reality for lighting studies, being used to: i) compare virtual and physical environments, ii) compare different lighting scenarios and iii) investigate users’ lighting preferences.