Influence of Spatial Lighting Distribution on Subjective Perception of Vehicle Driver in Road Lighti

Haiping Shen ^1*, Wenyi Li ², Xu Zeng ², Gang Wang ¹

¹ Department of Light Sources and Illuminating Engineering; Engineering Research Center of Advanced Lighting Technology, Ministry of Education, Fudan University; Shanghai, P.R.China

² Philips Lighting Research; Shanghai, P.R.China

*Contact email address: shenhaiping@fudan.edu.cn

Abstract—When driving on a lit road, how the drivers are feeling is greatly dependent on the lighting's characteristics, including color, luminance and illuminance of road and environment, glare, beam shape and etc. And, the influence of these characteristics can be from static situation as well as dynamic situation. Upon the growing market share of LED road lighting, complains from the vehicle drivers are reported on the less level of visual comfort perceived under LED road lighting. So far, intensive researches have been done on LED specific lighting parameters such as discomfort glare, which are all based on the pre-assumption of a simplified and static background scene. Besides of the current knowledge, are there any factors influence the drivers' visual comfort, and how the influence works?

This paper is to study the influence of spatial lighting distribution of luminaires, mainly the fluctuation of eye illuminance (named ‘smack effect’), on drivers' visual comfort. First of all, we built an experiment set ups in the laboratory based on virtual reality technology to eliminate the disturbances in the reality and ensure a controllable experiment. Then, we created different stimulus of eye illuminance from selected luminaires from real applications, and invited participants to experience and rate his/her perception of visual comfort upon the given 7-points scale. The result analysis shows that the critical dynamic range is the threshold of perceived visual comfort in a simulated driving mode.

Keywords- road lighting; visual perception; visual comfort; beam shapes; virtual reality