Utility of Automatic Lighting Design in 3-d Virtual Training Environments

Lighting design plays an important role in interactive 3-D training environments; it influences scene perception, scene understanding, attention, visual search, presence, immersion, and emotional involvement. Although there are several research projects that measured the impact of lighting in 3-D environments, little research focused on the development of new lighting design models to enhance the interactive experience. Current lighting design techniques rely on static manual designs. Since interactive training environments are dynamic and unpredictable, such static designs tend to be inflexible and do not adequately support the interaction. In this paper, I will discuss examples showing problems with current lighting design approaches. In addition, I will discuss ELE, an Expressive Lighting Engine, that automatically adapts the lighting to the interaction while accommodating scenario goals, user perception, attention, immersion, and emotional involvement. I also discuss the implication and the use of ELE in interactive 3-D training environments.