CMF & Technical Design
6 months
Immersive Cabin Experience
Above some inspiration images. A cyclorama extends the immersive quality of an environment to wrap around the viewer in 360 degrees. This enables the viewer to sit physically inside of the environment rather than view it from a distance.
The Challenge
The Immersive Cabin Experiences project is the third study under the Nexus Lighting Initiative series. It is probably one of the most remarkable projects of my career to date. Immersive Cabin Experiences expands the exploration of lighting to include cabin-wide spaces and activities. These experience prototypes are crucial in gaining feedback from users and stakeholders to refine ideas. They are also used to tell stories and help our stakeholders experience our vision.
The Outcome
The cyclorama is made up of rear-projection fabric, an aluminum and steel suspension structure, six HD projectors, a 3D mapping software and 2 high quality mirrors. We created an environment where lighting scenarios and effects could be updated digitally and manipulated in real-time. While this light simulation does not consist of actual light emitters, it was an important first step in translating the findings from the virtual reality experience prototype to the physical environment.
After researching and testing different materials to understand which one had an optimal optical and mechanical properties. The aglo fabric was the down-selected material and we built an early prototype of an 8’ long section of the sidewall, to ultimately fully test the selected fabric with different projectors.
An important next step for understanding lighting effects and illusions in the cyclorama was to study the effect of color and motion on the perception of space.
"Perception" user test - How lighting influences perception
The primary goal of our research was to study the effect of lighting on cabin perception. Illuminance, which refers to the level of incident light that illuminates a surface, is a property of light that can change the perception of a space. It is measured in a way that correlates to the human perception of brightness. Surfaces that receive a high level of illuminance are perceived as bright and surfaces that receive a low level of illuminance are perceived as dim. Previous research has found links between illuminance and perception of numerous attributes, including spaciousness, pleasantness, liveliness, formality, as well as whether a space feels private or public, relaxed or tense. Therefore, we decided to test the effect of low, medium, and high illuminance on perception by manipulating the amount of light cast upon each surface of a virtual mock-up.
Lighting Arrangements
Twenty-one lighting arrangements were prepared by combining three levels of illuminance (low, medium, and high) with seven lighting distributions (general lighting, cove lighting, up-lighting, wall washing, station line gradient, 777 baseline, and 787 baseline).
Bellow some pictures of the interior of the cyclorama with different lighting scenes.
