Empirical study of lighting environment towards visual comfort in virtual multimedia classroom

Virtual reality technology has been widely used in education scenarios. Among them, the immersive virtual multimedia classroom can mimic the physical classroom, so as to facilitate the performance of on-line learning. However, there are still gaps between the virtual and physical classroom, especially the lighting environment which plays an important role in the visual experience of participants. In this paper, we aim to study the relationship between the lighting parameters and the visual comfort. We firstly establish a virtual classroom with adjustable lighting parameters. Then we conduct user cases which mimic the natural and indoor lighting respectively, investigating the effect of the two different lighting environments upon the visual comfort. Particularly, we establish the empirical fitting models from the collected subjective ratings, which can provide the perception threshold and the optimal lighting conditions. The proposed method can benefit the design and implementation of virtual multimedia classroom.