Gaze-driven discomfort glare assessment: an extensive data collection
© 2015 EPFL
An extensive objective gaze and subjective glare-based dataset was acquired in a comprehensive experimental study on effects of daylit-induced discomfort glare on human visual responses. The experiments were done in an experimental facility specifically designed for these type of studies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fhg-ISE) in Freiburg (Germany).
Visual comfort is an important aspect of lighting in indoor-environments and a highly desirable design principle in contemporary architectural design. One of the main goals of visually comfortable Daylighting is to increase the access to glare-free daylight episodes. The type of glare, which is most commonly experienced in office settings, is known as discomfort glare and it’s caused by a wide variation of luminance contrast in the field-of-view. While playing a crucial role in any building’s overall performance, discomfort glare sensation is very hard to predict and design for, mainly because of inherent difficulties due to its dependence on gaze direction and visual responses to discomfort glare.
Mandana Sarey Khanie, a PhD Candidate at LIPID, who has been focusing her PhD research on understanding gaze dependencies of glare sensations towards responsive Daylighting design solutions, made a comprehensive user-assessment study from July to October 2013. In this study, a novel gaze-driven approach was developed and employed for visual comfort assessments to overcome the limitations of existing visual comfort metrics for a refined understanding of discomfort glare.
The acquired data set will serve as a basis for a future research project in the LIPID lab, which has been awarded a Swiss Nation Science Foundation (SNSF) grant. The research project will start in the summer of 2015 towards development of a dynamic responsive visual comfort metric, which integrates gaze patterns and visual system behavior.