Visualising Architectural Lighting Concept with 360° Panoramas

This paper presents the establishment and refinement of a visualisation workflow based on initial learnings from introducing mobile Virtual Reality (VR) as representational medium for visualising and visually evaluating architectural lighting concepts using rendered 360 degrees panoramas. Four student projects are described, each with a different aim and approach towards visualising architectural light in space: Two projects aiming at conveying reality with physically based lighting simulations and two projects with an artistic approach to conveying light impressions. The 360 degrees panoramas were used at low resolution during the design process to qualify the projects, and the final panoramas were presented with great success as a supplement to visualisations, diagrams, technical drawings and physical models at Bachelor and Master exams. The benefits of using familiar simulation and render software together with low cost, accessible and portable VR HMD's in the authors opinion far outweighs the reduced Field of View, lower frame-rate, lack of parallax and dynamic Point of View compared to realtime rendered high end VR.