Visualization tool for increased quality of vision

Considerable resources are currently spent on making society more accessible to disabled people. A large group that is often missing is people with moderate vision loss caused by normal ageing and disease. These people may very well meet the visual requirements for driving license but can still experience great difficulty in daily life. For example, symptoms may arise in environments with low levels of contrast in combination with bright light sources, a situation often caused by inappropriate design. This causes glare and is a rising problem due to the development of new light sources. The new lighting systems have much higher light levels and distribute the light in new geometries and colours that can be troublesome for large groups of people. The urge of saving energy, and the fast transition into unproven lighting systems, may have consequences in terms of reduced quality of lighting. To demonstrate these problems our research group is working with computer software that simulates various visual degradations by filtering digital images from cameras or CAD models. To test the tool we have designed indoor test environments. Observers with impaired vision due to normal ageing have assessed the lighting situations by performing normal actions and contrast tests. We have compared the real experience in the light situation with the simulated and predicted outcome from the software. In this presentation we will demonstrate problematic lighting situations and present visualizations using our tool. As the reason for bad design often is lack of understanding and knowledge from decision makers and planners, we aim at contributing with a tool that can improve quality assurance that takes visual aspects into account.