Space Brightness Evaluation for a Daylit Room

One of the most important problems for lighting design is how to reduce an electric energy. One way to solve this problem is use of daylight, but little is known how to perceive a brightness of a room illuminated by daylight come in through a window and artificial light. Although the horizontal illuminance increases because of daylight, we would not perceive the room as bright as brightness estimated by the illuminance. The purpose of this study is to measure the space brightness for daylit room and to propose a evaluation method. The experiment was conducted with a couple of miniature office rooms, standard room and test room. Test room has several types of windows and standard room has no window. Subject was asked to evaluate the brightness of the test room relative to the standard room with method of magnitude estimation. It was found that brightness of daylit room did not increase simply with horizontal illuminance. Subject perceived a daylit room darker than a room illuminated only by the artificial light even if horizontal illuminance of these room was same. The effect of daylight on space brightness would vary with the window size and intensity of daylight or artificial light.