A Review of Subjective Assessments in Virtual Reality for Lighting Research

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. With this aim, virtual environments must provide proper light distributions and elicit sensations similar to those seen in the real world. So far, experiments with human subjects are the most effective way to evaluate the accuracy of virtual reality in reproducing real spaces. This paper investigates the role of subjective assessments in lighting research using virtual reality. According to the review results, the investigations aimed at using immersive virtual reality for lighting can mainly be divided into three groups: (i) comparison between virtual and physical environments, (ii) analysis of different lighting scenarios, and (iii) investigation of users’ interaction with the virtual model. On the one hand, the results show that immersive virtual reality is a useful tool for research and design in lighting. On the other hand, they highlight the limitations that still need to be overcome. Finally, the main findings and gaps concerning the subjective assessment were listed.