Visual comfort assessment of OLED lighting in an indoor office environment

Abstract

Visual comfort is one of the significant criteria influencing good-quality lighting in an indoor environment. There are various technologies for delivering illumination in indoor installations; three important milestones are incandescent, fluorescent, and LED lighting. Alternative technologies, such as OLED (organic light-emitting diode) lighting, cannot be disregarded by a thorough examination. Few studies have investigated the influence of OLED lighting on visual comfort in terms of merely illuminance level. To this end, this study investigates the influence of OLED lighting conditions on visual comfort, including general comfort parameters—overall comfort, illuminance, brightness ratio, veiling reflections, colour, flicker effect, overall satisfaction—in an indoor office environment. Twelve members from the Faculty of Architecture, Çankaya University, voluntarily participated in the study. A full-scale indoor office environment was designed for the test environment, which was illuminated by OLED lighting (2900 K). An Office Lighting Survey was adopted to assess the general visual comfort of OLED lighting conditions in an indoor office environment. In contrast to earlier lighting studies, this study did not measure any task performance under the lighting condition. Instead, it focused solely on participants’ visual comfort evaluations when exposed to OLED lighting during their everyday routines in an indoor office environment. This study is a preliminary study for further investigations on the doctoral thesis.