The Principles of Camouflage—II

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Measuring discomfort from glare: recommendations for good practice

This article presents a review of the methods used for subjective evaluation of discomfort from glare, focusing on the two procedures most frequently used in past research – adjustment and category rating. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that some aspects of these procedures influence the evaluation, such as the range of glare source luminances available in an adjustment procedure, leading to biased evaluations and which hence reduce the reliability and validity of the data. The article offers recommendations for good practice when using these procedures and also suggests alternative methods that might be explored in further work

An experimental study on the effect of visual tasks on discomfort due to peripheral glare

This article concerns discomfort due to sources of glare in the peripheral visual field. A visual task is needed to maintain foveal fixation at a known location and in past studies the tasks have ranged from a simple fixation mark to a task requiring greater cognitive attention such as reading. It was hypothesized that these different approaches to control visual attention would influence the evaluation of discomfort. This article reports an experiment which compared evaluations of discomfort when using the two visual tasks, a simple circle and a pseudo-text reading task, and two procedures, category rating and luminance adjustment. The results from both procedures confirmed the hypothesis: a lower degree of discomfort was expressed in the pseudo-text trials than in trials with the circular fixation mark

Discomfort glare: What do we actually know?

Glare models were reviewed with an eye for missing conditions or inconsistencies. We found ambiguities as to when to use small source versus large source models, and as to what constitutes a glare source in a complex scene. We also found surprisingly little information validating the assumed independence of the factors driving glare. A barrier to progress in glare research is the lack of a standardized dependent measure of glare. We inverted the glare models to predict luminance, and compared model predictions against the 1949 Luckiesh & Guth data that form the basis of many of them. The models perform surprisingly poorly, particularly with regards to the luminance-size relationship and additivity. Evaluating glare in complex scenes may require fundamental changes to form of the glare models