Effects of light map orientation and shape on the visual perception of canonical materials

We previously presented a systematic optics-based canonical approach to test material-lighting interactions in their full natural ecology, combining canonical material and lighting modes. Analyzing the power of the spherical harmonics components of the lighting allowed us to predict the lighting effects on material perception for generic...

A systematic approach to testing and predicting light-material interactions

Photographers and lighting designers set up lighting environments that best depict objects and human figures to convey key aspects of the visual appearance of various materials, following rules drawn from experience. Understanding which lighting environment is best adapted to convey which key aspects of materials is an important question in...

A toolbox for volumetric visualization of light properties

In this paper, we introduce a toolbox for the perceptually based visualization of light in a volume, focusing on the visual effects of illumination. First, our visualizations extend the conventional methods from a two-dimensional representation on surfaces to the whole volume of a scene. Second, we extend the conventional methods from showing...

Visual Light Zones

In this article, we studied perception of a particular case of light fields that is characterized by a difference in its consistent structure between parts of a scene. In architectural lighting design, such a consistent structure in a part of a light field is called a light zone. First, we explored whether human observers are sensitive to...

Asymmetric perceptual confounds between canonical lightings and materials

To better understand the interactions between material perception and light perception, we further developed our material probe MatMix 1.0 into MixIM 1.0, which allows optical mixing of canonical lighting modes. We selected three canonical lighting modes (ambient, focus, and brilliance) and created scenes to represent the three illuminations....

Material dependent appearance effects brought out by natural light environments

The global structure of the visual light field and its relation to the physical light field

Human observers have been demonstrated to be sensitive to the local (physical) light field, or more<br/>precisely, to the primary direction, intensity, and diffuseness of the light at a point in a space. In the<br/>present study we focused on the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct the global visual light field, based on observers’...

MatMix 1.0: Using optical mixing to probe visual material perception

MatMix 1.0 is a novel material probe we developed for quantitatively measuring visual perception of materials. We implemented optical mixing of four canonical scattering modes, represented by photographs, as the basis of the probe. In order to account for a wide range of materials, velvety and glittery (asperity and mesofacet scattering) were...