Development of a Lighting Simulation System in Consideration of the Size of the Luminescent Surface

Abstract

We propose a novel method for the lighting simulation system which can treat a luminaire locating different spectral distributions on the portion of the luminescent surface. The feature of the proposed method is to do the lighting simulation using multiple virtual small light sources with individual distribution of luminous intensity and spectrum. The virtual small light sources are obtained through subdividing the luminescent surface of the luminaire. The conventional lighting simulation method has a problem caused by the limitation of the projection direction of light, that is, a point on the illuminated surface and the direction of light projected from the luminaire is one to one correspondence. We can solve this problem through employing the proposed concept of the virtual small light sources. We confirmed the usefulness of the proposed method through a prototype which implemented the proposed method.