The Arbitrary Road from Reality to Virtual Reality
Monica Billger, Beata Stahre Wästberg, Ilona Heldal · Chalmers Publication Library (Chalmers University of Technology) · 2004
Virtual Reality has great potential to become a usable design tool for the planning of light and colour in buildings. The problem of lighting scenes is the central conceptual and practical problem of computer graphics, due to the complex interaction between light and objects, [1, p.73-74]. In most computer graphics today, the goal is to make visualizations that look good and enough natural [1, 2]. At present, light and colour cannot be simulated in a realistic and reliable way in Virtual Reality (VR), as was shown experimentally [3,4]. In real rooms, differently painted surfaces affect each other by reflections, causing colour variations on equally painted surfaces that are not reproduced in virtual rooms. Existing software for light calculation, such as LightscapeTM and 3dsmax 6.0, use radiosity to calculate how much light that strikes back from a surface. A colour bleeding scale is used to define how much the colour of the surface should change the colour of the bouncing light. The scale is arbitrary, since there are no recommendations built upon knowledge on how coloured surfaces reflect upon each other.