Effectiveness of Indoor Daylight Replication in Virtual Reality

Abstract

This paper explores ways of letting users interact with daylighting spaces in a virtual reality (VR) environment. Two methods for viewing daylighting in VR are presented, both of which use a physically-based raytracer to generate daylighting images and a game engine for viewing them. The first method creates a 360° panorama of the space at a particular point. This is then extended to generate multiple renderings from different locations in the scene, allowing users to view the space from different positions. The second method creates a texture for each polygon face in the scene. This approach allows users to freely move around the scene at the cost of losing the specular component of the textures. Finally, a user study is proposed to compare the two methods.