Designing a Set of Probes To Evaluate Lighting Setups for Apparel Retail Applications

Abstract

In realm of product design, studio photography and advertising, lighting is often carefully fine-tuned to depict the visual features and material properties of the products. In fact, the importance of lighting has been extensively studied in material perception. From standpoint of retail design, however, the proper illumination of the products sometimes is overshadowed by atmospheric aspect of lighting. Since most of the consumer purchases are driven by sensory attraction and good feeling, retailers and retail lighting designers need new approaches to evaluate the merchandise appearance, so they can enhance the sensory attraction, and eventually respond to consumer expectations. For many materials and shapes, computer simulation is sufficiently capable of realistic demonstration of the effects of lighting. However, in case of textiles, simulation is too complex and rather inaccurate. This study has attempted to find a practical solution to help retail lighting designers predict the effect of illumination on textile materials. Having a clear overview of the literature and the context, an experimental research framework was developed, and two experiments for acquiring necessary materials for designing a physical probe to diagnose the effect of lighting are carried out.